


The End of History

by RobertSaysThis



Series: Doctor Who: Be Afraid [10]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, All your favourite historical figures in the Be Afraid universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ancient History, Ancient Rome, Angry Doctor (Doctor Who), Angst, Bleak, But not based on the actress Maxine Peake as a person, Carthage - Freeform, Carthago Delano Est, Dark, Dark Doctor (Doctor Who), Family, Gen, Gen Work, Hasdrubal Boetharch, He’s here too, I do not think she would point a bomb at anything, If you're looking for Hasdrubal Boetharch fanfic you are totally covered here, Nuclear Weapons, Scipio Aemilianus, The Monk is played by Maxine Peake, War, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2019-10-14 18:36:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 23,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17513816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobertSaysThis/pseuds/RobertSaysThis
Summary: There are places the Doctor will never go, and she’s trapped in one of them now. A forgotten city with a forgotten weapon, with humanity’s future in its hands. A place that could wipe the present day from time. But maybe her friends aren’t sure that’s a bad idea...And there’s a woman the Doctor’s never taken seriously, who’s known only as the Monk. She’ll take any option and smash every law, and it’s a very long time since she’s ever mattered at all.You can’t change history, not one line.But maybe it’s time for someone to break the rules.





	1. Chapter 1




	2. Chapter 2

It was somewhere in the Second Century BC, and feminism hadn’t been invented yet. If someone had told Hasdrubal Boetharch as a young man that one day he’d take orders from a woman, he’d have slit them across their chests just for suggesting it. But it was a long time since he had considered himself a young man, though by counting it had only been three years.

The siege had been going forever for him now. He looked down at the Romans every morning from the citadel at the top of the city, a swarm of gray preventing any food from entering his world. This was the capital of the second mightiest Empire in the world, but you wouldn’t know it to look at its people now. Even the strongest soldiers were pale and gaunt from starvation, showing signs of diseases that might prove as fatal as the war. Death had started its long hold on the city— but Hasdrubal knew how much harder it would grip if ever the Romans broke through.

“Tell me again,” he said to the woman who was now his ruler. “Tell me about the prophecy.

The woman smiled and said the same thing she said every morning, in a voice someone thousands of years in the future might have said was a little bit Northern. Not that she was from the north of anywhere, of course: she was an alien, and she was a Time Lord.

But she was not the Doctor.

“Prophecy?” she said. “Grand word, that, when you’re just talking about something that happens.”

“Whatever you call it, I want to hear. I need resolve, now more than ever. I went hungry last night, did you know that? The chief defender of this city, and there’s not enough for me to eat! An army can’t survive on a woman’s stories,” he said. “But it helps us all go on when we understand what’s at stake.”

The woman smiled and began to tell her story.

“This city,” she said. “Carthage. It’s still great now. Name known across all of the world you know. But in the future that’s from—“ she gestured at the thing in the centre of the room, and shrugged— “nobody’s really heard of you.”

Hasdrubal swallowed. “Then we are forgotten?”

“Not completely. Does the name _Tunisia_ mean anything to you?”

“Why would it?” said Hasdrubal, as he had done many times before.

“You wouldn’t, if I hadn’t already said. But it’s a popular country in the future. Known for its ruins. _Roman_ ones. Mosaics and coliseums where men fought to the death, far out there in the scorching desert sands. And underneath those ruins are some other ones nobody visits, all broken and ugly, forgotten. And hardly anyone knows how that proud country,” she smiled, “might once have gone by another name…”

Despite himself, Hasdrubal gave an anguished roar.

”No more,” he said. “That’s horror enough for a morning like this. My stomach will give me the rest of the suffering I need.”

The woman raised an eyebrow. “But you asked me to tell you the story.”

“I always forget, ‘till it’s told. How it’s a tale of something awful that _will_ soon come to pass. And how close it is in beginning to begin.”

“The Romans,” said the woman, “think that prophecies can be changed.”

The general gestured to the huge thing in the room. “And this is a way of changing it?”

“Oh, Hasdrubal. It’ll make the sun set on their empire. And it’ll do it in a very literal way.”

“To wipe them out, as Hannibal once tried. That would be justice. You know what they say, in their senate back in Rome?”

“I’ve heard it!” smiled the woman. “Spent some time there, a life or so ago. We’d all be sitting through some boring speech or other, and then the worst of them’d be banging his fist on some passing stool or slave. _‘Carthage must be destroyed!’_ he’d cry, and all of us would agree. We’d below it, again and again; banging our fists against everything in the building like we thought we were in Carthage there and then.”

“It’s a travesty,” said Hasdrubal. “But we had weapons here before yours. I hope not to need the tricks of outspoken women,” he snarled, “but I can’t pretend I’m not grateful to have them now.”

The woman looked at the thing she’d brought back to the past, barely even listening to what Hasdrubal was saying.

“It’s funny, you know. My people’d say the same thing as those Romans in their senate. They wouldn’t shout and scream, or do a drunken roar. They’d just all look very _profound_. As if that made them better, staying stern. Like the pomposity of it’d be enough to make them anything other than monsters.”

“Do you see yourself as a hero, turning traitor?”

“I don’t label it, except when there’s a need to. Enough that the universe has its people a bit like me.”

“And in the future where Carthage stands, will there still be people like you?” 

The woman smiled. “People with mad beliefs that live far away from the world? Too right there will. No matter where history goes, there’ll always be room for a monk.”

Every Time Lord knew you should never change history, and what the consequences might be if you did. But like any bureaucratic people, there were times they made allowances— and like any all-powerful Empire, there were times that would help them sleep.

When the Doctor slept she would always have nightmares, and the ones she had would never feature the Monk. She had bigger things to fear – or so she thought – than a person who always just mocked her. Who said what they thought a real rebel should look like, and who only even threatened to make that rebellion real.

But the Monk had her nightmares also, and now they were coming true. She’d seen omens in the air and horrors in the sand, and she began to understand that a would-be-rebel might not have much time to become one.

So she’d come to a forgotten part of history, on which the entire future of the world might still depend. She wasn’t thinking of the Doctor as she did it, as she bargained with corrupt officials in Siberia and formed her TARDIS round a thing too large for its shell. She was thinking of the forces she was fighting and the people who would never take action against them, who were too proud or heroic to do an unthinkable thing. And she _had_ thought that thing, and she’d done it, and in doing it she had joined so many wars. She was mad. She was angry.

And she’d pointed a hydrogen bomb at Ancient Rome.


	3. Chapter 3

It had been a long time since anyone in Carthage had eaten well. When a city begins to starve, everything goes: the bad food as quick as the good; the animals along with the grass. Even the most important people were thinning down to bones, and there were more bones piling in the streets than anyone had strength left to count.

Chris couldn’t see any of this as she stood in the door of the TARDIS. The Doctor was talking excitedly to her as she blocked her entire view, hands waving wildly so Chris couldn’t see past her sides.

“Stop talking,” she said to the Doctor wearily. “I haven’t been listening for ages.”

“But I’m just getting started! We’ve the whole top fifty to go. Like I was saying, the thirty- _fourth_ most surprising fact about mushrooms is”—

“Why are you talking about mushrooms?”

said Chris. “Are we on a mushroom planet?”

“We are! We’re on the Earth. There’s loads of mushrooms lying about here.”

Chris sighed. “Why aren’t you letting me look at the Earth? I see it all the time. Is everyone dead?”

“Not quite,” said the Doctor. “Not yet. But what’s happening to them?” She winced. “It’s pretty unpleasant.”

“I can handle it.”

“You won’t know that ‘till you’ve seen it, and once you have there’ll be no taking it back. I’m not about to use my memory scourer on a child.”

Chris gave her the withering stare a child can use to win an argument.

“I’ll be _fine_ ”, she said.

The Doctor sighed. “Okay,” she said. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Hesitantly she drew away, and Chris instantly knew she should have listened to her. The people in the city reminded her of when she’d seen her great grandfather at the hospice— when she was younger, but old enough to know that he didn’t have long. When she’d seen him, she’d been terrified at how thin his skin had seemed: like someone had wrapped a skeleton in tracing paper and pretended it was someone she knew. But everyone was like that here, the children as much as the adults. They were bones held together by the smallest amount of life, and Chris could see the starvation in their eyes.

“Did aliens do this?” she said quietly.

“It’s much worse than that,” said the Doctor as she shook her head. “People did. That’s why I didn’t want you to see.”

She took a deep breath.

“Carthage has held out for a long time now,” she said, “but the story goes back even further. A while ago the Romans”—

“The Romans?” said Chris. “But we’ve already been to them. And they weren’t all sick and hungry like everyone here.”

“That was completely different. These people aren’t Roman at all; it’s the Romans who did this to them.”

Chris crossed her arms. “You can go anywhere. It’s still the same.”

“No, it _is_ different,” said the Doctor again. “Hundreds of years away, and a whole other continent!”

“It’s still Romans again,” said Chris. “But it’s even more horrible than before.”

“That’s no way to think about things,” said the Doctor. “It’s 146 BC! Ages before last time. As far away from our holiday as World War Two is to you. You can’t just lump all that time together and put it in a box labelled ‘Romans.’”

“Yes you can,” said Chris. “When there’s lots of places we haven’t been. Like the Shwedagon Pagoda.”

The Doctor frowned. “That’s a very specific example to use—“

She had more to say, but was interrupted by a frighteningly cheerful voice.

“A Police Box thousands of years too early?” it from some way away. “That’s what I like to see! Doctor! It’s _me!_ And I’m a _woman!_ With _breasts!_ ”

“Oh God,” said the Doctor. “Oh no. Maybe you’re right, Chris; lots of different history to explore! That place you just mentioned, all the other bits. Let’s get away from here as fast as we possibly—“

A frizzy haired woman ran up to the TARDIS and grinned, before her face fell as she saw who the Doctor was now.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re also—“

“Yeah.”

The strange woman pouted. “Well. That’s no fun.”

“It’s not about fun,” the Doctor shrugged. “It’s just who I am. This is Chris,” she added. “She’s my friend; she isn’t very old. Please don’t go starting to swear.”

Chris looked up at the woman who was worryingly like the Doctor. You could _tell_ she was an alien in exactly the same way, as if someone had mentioned a fact that you’d always known. She was taller and dressed more eccentrically, with a plastic teal coat that reminded Chris of a bin liner. But she still had that _grin_ that would mark out a runaway Time Lord, youthful and innocent in a way that could burn down a world. Chris thought about what the Doctor might be like if she hadn’t decided to be _good_ , and remembered how it could be wise to be afraid.

“Do you have a medical degree?” she asked the stranger.

“No,” they said, “at least, not any more. Get my left and right confused, and when you’re a surgeon, well—“ she winced, then turned the wince to a grin.

“Oh. It’s just that you’re _very_ like the Doctor”—

“She’s nothing like me,” muttered the Doctor. “She calls herself _the Monk._ ”

“You get female monks,” said the Monk defensively.

“In Buddhism,” said Chris, who’d done it in school.

“The Monk and me go way back,” said the Doctor. “I’ve known her since I was almost as young as you. We’re—“

“Friends,” said the Monk.

“Enemies,” finished the Doctor.

“Frenemies,” said the Monk, “if you’re going to be like that. Though I’ve got more reason to hate you than you do me. Still, water under the bridge, eh?” She grinned. “You can’t change history.”

“She’s making a joke there, the Monk,” said the Doctor. “‘Cause changing history’s what she likes to do. No matter how delicate and fraught the web of time, she’ll always find a way to drive a fist right through it. And that’s why you’re here,” she said as realisation dawned. “Oh, God. That’s why you’re here.”

“Still feeling sharp in your old age,” said the Monk without affection.

“We’re very early in this species’ history,” said the Doctor. “It could have billions of years still to go. The timeline’s already fraying, and I’ll bet you want to blast it with a flamethrower.”

“I do. And what’s so wrong about that?”

“It’s _wildly_ irresponsible.”

“That’s top Doctor, that is. You’re doing the hits.”

The Monk put on a high pitched voice that sounded nothing like her friend.

_“Look at me, I’m the Doctor!”_ she squealed, _“I’m mad and cool and I’m terribly rebellious. And I always break the rules, except for that one that I just can’t be breaking at all! And that one, and this one, and this jolly awful one that says that you have to die. Oh well, nothing to be done! Spit-spot; wouldn’t be proper. You can’t change history!”_ She laughed. “A hundred percent rebel Time Lord? My arse!”

“The Doctor doesn’t speak like that,” said Chris.

“Every Time Lord does,” said the Monk, “once you’ve heard enough to recognise it.”

“You do have rules,” Chris said to the Doctor. “Like with those lizard people we met. You wouldn’t save them, although you could’ve done. You wouldn’t even tell them that you could.”

“That’s our Doctor,” said the Monk. “And if I was feeling naughty, I could let you into a secret”—

“Okay,” said the Doctor. “I think you’d better wait in the TARDIS, Chris. Me and the Monk might have to have a word”—

“She’s not going to save these people either,” said the Monk. “She’s going to let everyone die.”

Chris looked at her friend in horror. “ _What?!_ ” she said.

The Doctor looked down at her feet.

“Well,” she said after a while. “This is great, isn’t it? We’re having lots of fun in Carthage.”

She gave a sigh that was more like a growl.

“Reunions,” she said with a snarl. “You always know they’ll be awful, don’t you?”

She looked up at the Monk with contempt.

“So it’s funny,” she said, “when they’re still worse than you ever imagine.”


	4. Chapter 4

In the biggest tent of the fort he had ordered built, General Scipio scowled. Another day had passed without Carthage in ruins, and that meant he was now an older man. Other Romans valued age, but he’d never seen the point of it: every new twinge in his body made it less willing to deliver death.

It was true that time could bring wisdom to mediocre men, but a man like him shouldn’t have to bother to wait. That was the argument he’d made to the Senate, once this war had dragged on for too long. It didn’t matter that he was too young for it, he’d said. All that mattered was that he was able to win.

But he’d been here for some time now, and the winning still hadn’t happened. They’d breached parts of the city and been driven back, they’d blocked all supplies from both land and sea. But after everything Carthage was still holding out, though surely it wasn’t long before its fall.

Still. In Scipio’s nightmares he’d be here forever, turning from someone too young to be a general into bones much too old to be a man. He imagined himself aging like a rusting pipe, telling all the water rushing by that the corrosion seeping through him made him great. That was all age was, at the end of it. He’d be just like the rest of them before too long.

His thoughts were interrupted as a soldier tromped into the tent, the guards outside making no effort to stop him at all. He grunted as he dragged in a cloth-covered mass, then dropped it to let it clunk against the ground.

 _“WHERE IS YOUR DISCIPLINE!?”_ yelled Scipio in a voice that was slightly wrong. “You shouldn’t barge in on a man of my rank unless”—

“It’s a matter of life and death,” muttered the soldier, kneeling down to the something to the ground. He drew back the cloth to reveal the body of a man, so motionless that Scipio was stunned to see it was still alive.

“He’s red,” he said softly. “But”—

“The wrong kind of red,” said the soldier. “Like it’s painted on, like on one of our shields. Not the red a man goes when he’s choking to death”—

But the man on the floor _was_ choking to death, and the soldier broke off as he let out a horrible gargle.

“Ah,” he spluttered between anguished breaths. “Acch”—

“He’s trying to tell us something,” said the soldier. “Something vital.”

“More than that,” said Scipio. “He has a message from the gods.”

The soldier looked at him awkwardly, trying to convey his scepticism to a man who could sentence him to death.

“Acchhhtt,” spluttered the man on the floor, “acchssst”—

“He doesn’t sound much like the gods,” said the soldier awkwardly.

“Don’t be a fool! The gods can be felt in everything. Great men are always alert for them when history’s about to be made. And make no mistake, man, that _is_ what will happen here”—

“Acccssshhht,” spluttered the man on the floor as the red of his body grew deeper, “schtrrrrr”—

He choked for a final time.

“Exterminate,” he croaked hoarsely.

With a crack like bone something shot out of his mouth: a metal pole far too long to ever have been there in the first place. _An eyestalk_ , the Doctor would have said, although she would already have been running when she did. But no one in this era would have known what a Dalek was, or that it was impossible to be terrified enough at the thing that emerged from the man.

The soldier looked at the body in a panic. It was a corpse, now, but it somehow seemed redder than before.

“Spirits,” he said. “Dark arts!”

“Hah!” laughed Scipio. “It’s nothing to be frightened of. “It’s an omen, just as I said. A man as red as the god of war, crying out a torch to light the flame.”

He nodded to one side of the tent, where the stretch of Carthage still stood long and tall.

“Our enemies will burn redder than this man very soon,” he said. “We’ll turn them to ash and grind the ash to dust. Carthage must be destroyed! And it _WILL_ be! We _ARE_ the superior force here; ours _IS_ the superior world!

The soldier nodded politely, and looked afraid.

”We will crush those who challenge us!” Scipio was roaring, “and kill all who resist! This city cannot stand in the world of Rome”—

–the roar burst into a scream–

“And it will be _EXTERMINATED!_ ”

There was a sound in his voice that no man could have made, and the soldier tried to ignore how he’d made it all the same.

“Carthage must be destroyed,” the soldier said uneasily. Hastily he lifted the dead man from the arms, dragging him out of the tent as quickly as he could.

Scipio relaxed, glad to have him gone.

He chuckled to himself softly.

“We conquer and destroy,” he said to himself. “As the greatest among us must. It’s the oath underpinning our city. Exterminate. Exterminate.”

He pulled off the armour covering his waist, red with studded bumps rising from every point. Under it his flesh was no longer flesh, and it now was red and bumped too.

He smiled.

“An omen,” he said happily. “There have been so many omens.”


	5. Chapter 5

They’d landed on the highest point of the city, while the sun was near its lowest point in the sky. It wasn’t quite evening yet, but the afternoon was dark blue, and the buildings of Carthage were shadowed in early gloom.

For her part, Chris felt pretty gloomy as well. She’d got over her disgust at the starving people and now saw they were just like her, human beings who’d been born in a less lucky portion of time. The Doctor had tried to stop her even seeing what the children in front of her lived with every day, and thinking about that made her extremely angry.

“It feels strange to think she’ll be dead soon,” she said as she looked at a girl about her age. “Though everyone’s dead already, in the past.” She looked up at the Doctor. “Is that the same? It doesn’t feel like it is, when we’re actually here.”

The Doctor didn’t respond to her. She was just looking warily at the Monk, like she was worried how _she_ might respond.

“That girl doesn’t have to be dead soon,” said the Monk quietly.

“But someone does,” said the Doctor. “I’m not sure there’s a way around that.”

“Not when you’re stuck in your ways. Death is coming soon, if nothing changes. The Romans break through the harbour and no one’s expecting it; the city fights its best but the best’s not enough against them.”

She was looking blankly into the distance like she’d already seen it, like the horrors of the universe were always etched into her eyes.

“You’re a child,” she said to Chris, “but there’s a point when even children have to know. Carthage loses; Rome tears down everything that they are.”

“I guessed that would happen,” said Chris. “Everyone’s heard of the Romans, but nobody talks about here.”

“They burn the city to nothing and put all the ruins in a hole,” said the Monk, “then they fill it back up so there’s nothing left here anymore. There’s no kind of justice to it, no mercy. It’s the kind of thing your friend’s defending,” she nodded over to the Doctor, “when she says that you can’t change history.”

Chris frowned. “But you’re the Doctor’s friend too.”

“We’re frenemies now. Keep up, human-brain.”

“You’re all very rude,” said Chris. “The Time Lords.”

“The Romans kill everything; did you know that?” the Monk went on, as she rudely ignored what Chris was trying to say. “Not just the people. The rats and the dogs and the birds; everything’s slaughtered when they come. Not that there’s much of them left here, after this long of a siege. But then that sort of thing’s alright, isn’t it? As long as it’s _necessary_.”

“It’s awful,” said Chris. 

“History _is_ awful,” said the Doctor. “I’m not denying that. There’s no part of anyone I’ve been who’d defend what’ll happen here. But your world, Chris— it’s built on things like this. Every place there ever was has an atrocity somewhere in its bones. For you to happen, then this has to happen too.”

She sighed.

“And I’m sorry for that,” she said. “I really, truly am. If there was any way to stop it? I’d do it, no questions asked? But here?”

Her shoulders fell.

“There isn’t anything that we can do.”

“Awful, isn’t it?” said the Monk. “When a doctor says there’s nothing to be done. Makes you wonder if there’s something they haven’t told you. An experimental treatment, which they know you’d try. However deadly it might turn out to be.”

“I don’t want to know what you mean by that,” said the Doctor, “but I know I’m going to have to ask you anyway.”

“It’s nothing, really,” said the Monk. “These people are totally outmatched. Rome’s soldiers are stronger and there’s thousands of them fully fed; Carthage’d need something astonishing to stop them now.”

She smiled.

“That’s why I gave them a nuclear bomb,” she said.

The Doctor and Chris both gasped out loud at once.

_“No!”_ said Chris with a shout. “You can’t”—

“It was pointed at Rome anyway. I’ve just pointed it further back. They’ll need a _very_ early warning system, to catch it when it’s here!”

“Please don’t joke about nuclear war,” said Chris, who was beginning to feel sick.

“You’re scaring her,” said the Doctor. “You’re scaring _me._ ”

“I don’t have the bomb on me. I gave it to the ruler of this place. One _Hasdrubal Boetharch_. He’s nobody, really— not even one of the famous Hasdrubals. Though a bomb makes you powerful, of course. However not famous you are.”

She yawned, looking bored with the horrifying situation she’d engineered.

The Doctor noticed that Chris was starting to shake with fear, and wished she had some means to get her away. Whatever she might have thought in her whimsical moments, a Time Lord’s life was a terrible place for a child. But she had to stay and ask the horrible questions. She had to uncover more that was happening here.

“Your friend Hasdrubal,” she said. “Why’s he not fired the bomb already? Rome’s army is here; his people’re already dying. Why would a ruler just sit around and wait?”

“Bomb has a lock on it. It’s hopeless.”

Chris frowned. “Then won’t it be easy to break?”

“That’s not what she means,” said the Doctor. “A Hopeless Lock. They guard the greatest weapons of our people. When something is too terrible to use, too unthinkable, then as long as we’ve a chance there’s no using it; the lock won’t break. But when there isn’t any hope at all? That’s when the unthinkable becomes”—

“Necessary,” said the Monk.

The Doctor scowled. “That’s _not_ what I was going to say”—

“I didn’t like what you were going to say. So I changed it. It’s sort of what I do.”

“Monk, no matter how reckless you are, surely even _you_ know that firing a nuclear bomb is”—

“Always better than doing nothing. Look, Doctor; changing history. Bit of a laugh at first, but I’m deadly serious about it now. You have all those oaths and rules I never listen to. Don’t think this is anything other than mine.”

Her eyes flicked briefly to the citadel at the top of the city, and she looked concerned.

“Can’t do it alone, of course,” she said. “Best be getting back, show old Hasdrubal how to turn the key. It’s simple, of course, but you know what men are like!”

“Don’t do that,” said the Doctor. “Just don’t, _please_.”

The Monk rolled her eyes. “I wish I could say I remember you used to be fun.”

She waved goodbye to Chris.

“See you around,” she said. “Enjoy the sights!”

Chris wondered what she meant as she watched the Monk racing away. There _weren’t_ any sights in Carthage— just people expecting to die. It wasn’t the kind of place where you’d go for an exciting adventure, and that could only mean—

“I don’t think you wanted to come here,” Chris said to the Doctor. “You wouldn’t have thought I should see.”

The Doctor sighed. “The Romans twice? Of course I didn’t mean to come here. It’s breaking all the rules. But I have to stay, or the Monk’ll break even more.”

“I don’t like you hiding things from me. I’ve said so loads of times, and I don’t think you ever listen.”

“I do listen. I just don’t want to take you places where there isn’t a right thing to do.”

Chris looked pointedly at her. “Your friend thinks there’s a right thing to do.”

“She isn’t my friend. She really scared you just then.”

“I don’t like when people talk about nuclear weapons. But what you’re saying’s scaring me too. That you’ll just sit and watch everyone die.”

“But I don’t want to! And the Monk _does_ ; her plan means she’ll kill people! It means she’ll kill _you_. A bomb from the future that blows up the timeline it’s from? That’s a paradox, and a violent one. It’ll shatter your future to pieces, so nothing you knew will ever‘ve existed at all. And it won’t just be your time that goes! Everything will; all the past that’s still to come. Charles Darwin; the Rome we saw. Remember our friend Herminius? He was great, wasn’t he? We can’t just go around saying he shouldn’t exist.”

“He was okay,” said Chris doubtfully. “But I don’t understand why all of it can’t exist. His Rome and the city we’re in now. Why not? Is it something to do with time?”

The Doctor knew how easy it would be to lie in response to that. And she might have done so once, in a previous lifetime or five. But she couldn’t be that person anymore, especially now that Chris had met the Monk.

“It’s something to do with people,” she said. “Two massive empires, two enormous armies. Each wanting to be the one who rules over all of the world. Or the bit of it they care about it, at least. Carthage or Rome, it doesn’t matter much which. But it’s a rule as real as any of the laws of time, that one of them must be destroyed.”

“These people don’t look like they’re destroying Rome. They’re sitting round starving to death.”

“They’re not doing that here. But a hundred years ago”—

“They’re not from a hundred years ago,” snapped Chris. “They’re from _now_.”

“Chris.” The Doctor spoke in a voice that tried to make it better, but made it worse. “Things aren’t always simple, in places like this—“

Chris gave her the look the Doctor feared more than anything else in the world. It was the look of contempt and betrayal, when a child starts to realise they should never have had faith in you at all.

“That’s not what the Monk would say,” Chris said.

“The Monk hasn’t done this as much as me. She thinks there’s an easy answer. She wasn’t always like this, you know: time was she’d sell all the grannies in the world if it meant that she wouldn’t get harmed. It’s ‘cause she had no conscience for so long that she needs to make up for lost time. But that doesn’t mean that she’s _good_ at being good”—

“You don’t get to decide who’s good!” said Chris. “She’s being what you _said_ you were. And she’s doing what I thought that you would do.”

”She has a nuclear bomb, Chris.”

”It scares me. But”—

Chris looked like she was about to cry.

“She’s trying,” she said. “I thought that you’d be trying.”

The Doctor groaned internally, knowing what she’d have to do.

“If I can’t be who you need me to be,” she said. “Then we’ll have to get someone who can. Who knows a lot about what’s right and what’s wrong, and can help us both understand what to do.”

She looked down at Chris as she drew out her mobile phone.

“We’re going to get out the big guns,” she said. “We’re going to send for your mother.”


	6. Chapter 6

In a tiny supermarket two thousand years away, Lorna Robinson’s day was getting worse.

“Doctor,“ she groaned down her phone, “I’m at _work!_ You’re not supposed to call me when I’m on.”

“Yes,” the Doctor replied from ancient Carthage, “but this is _incredibly_ important”—

“You said that when you thought your spoon had broken.”

“It didn’t have a face!” said the Doctor. “How was I supposed to know it never came with one? But no. It’s a lot more important than that.”

“It better be. I can’t look like I’m slacking off. My manager will literally kill me”—

“I understand,” said the Doctor, “but if we don’t take drastic action then your manager _might not even be born_ “—

“Worse tragedies have happened.”

“Not just them!” said the Doctor desperately. “ _Everyone_ , Lorna, all the people you’ve known! You, and Chris and King James the Second! Parsley the Lion! All of the Beatles! We’ll lose everyone in history ever, for over two thousand years!”

Lorna looked out to the almost deserted shop floor. An old woman was inspecting a tin. An oldish man was pretending that he wasn’t shoplifting. It felt hard to believe that the fate of the world was at stake.

She gave a long and heavy sigh.

“The thing is, Doctor. What with Christina being away. I was going to go out with my friends tonight.”

The voice on the phone went sharp.

“You can’t go out with your friends if _all of history_ falls apart—“

“I can’t go out with them anyway. It’s so rare, getting the chance. Everyone always says how awful it is going clubbing in your thirties; it’s made me really want to have a go.”

In a millennium gone, the Doctor gritted her teeth. “Lorna. The person I’m up against now. She’s _me_.”

“Gosh,” said Lorna. “One of the man ones?”

“No, I don’t mean she’s literally me! The Monk, she’s what I would be if I was _more_ reckless, _more_ self righteous. If I looked at all the things I’d never do, then decided I should do them all the same.”

“Oh God,” said Lorna. “She sounds like the most awful woman in the world.”

“Bigging me up,” said the Doctor. “That’s what I count on you for.”

”You set yourself up, you do.”

“It’s stupid, though,” the Doctor went on. “The Monk’s nothing! An old joke from the past that no one remembered but me. Or maybe she _was_ nothing, before something changed in the universe. But the way she is now? I don’t think I’m able to beat her. I can’t win against someone who’s gone even more _me_ than me.”

Lorna sighed.

“Whenabouts are you?” she said. “I can leave in an hour or so. If that makes any difference to a time traveller.”

“Might do. It’s all very complicated. I’m in Carthage in 146 BC. So. You know what that means.”

“I don’t, no. I’ve no idea what Carthage is.”

“Well, if you don’t get here soon,” said the Doctor, “ _nobody_ might know what it is. Because it’ll still exist,” she continued lamely, “and they won’t.”

Lorna looked out at the grey world outside, and just for a moment felt relaxed to think it might all go away.

Her mind prodded her firmly, reminding her she had a daughter.

“ _Fine_ ,” she said. “I’ll come and save all of our history. But you’re taking me clubbing afterwards, right? Somewhere the nights are longer, so I’ve more time to sleep when we’re done.”

“We can go clubbing as much as we want,” said the Doctor, “after we’ve both finished here. There’s some tech from the Simons still around, from their trips to the future from your shop. If I text you _exactly_ what to do, you can get here without splattering through time.”

“And I definitely have to do this?”

“Oh no. You can stay there and splatter with everyone else instead. But, y’know. You couldn’t go clubbing then.”

“Okay,” said Lorna, “I’ll do it for the night out at the end. It’s what used to get me through the job, after all. Back in the day.”

She beeped off her phone and got ready to travel through time.

On the other end of the line in the distant past, the Doctor smiled sadly to herself.

“Oh yes,” she said. “We’ll both have a great time clubbing.”

She looked down past the walls to the massing army below.

“After we’ve destroyed the city,” she said, “and we’ve burned this world to the ground.”

She felt more desolate than she’d remembered feeling before—

—then saw something that made everything even worse. Some way in the distance, something very ill-suited to ancient history materialised out of thin air.

“Whenever I think I’ve seen the most inappropriate thing in the world,” said the Doctor, “we’re always out there bursting with new surprises. Oh, Monk,” she sighed, “what’ve you bought _that_ here for?”


	7. Chapter 7

Whenever the sun set over Carthage, Hasdrubal would always think of blood. The streets would run red, but only with dying light: the life of his people still firmly pulsed in their veins.

Once, the redness of the city would have driven him to despair. But like so much in Carthage, he had been reforged. Though the sun was setting, night had not arrived. It might still rise again, for a man who believed in miracles.

And if all else failed, of course, he could now make a sun of his own.

The weapon the Monk had given him towered over him, green and dull like a tree gone dead with mould. He tried once again to turn the key that would set it off, and just like before the lock stood still with a groan. He still had hope, then. The bomb would remind him of that.

He swung round as his advisor Arabo rushed into the room. He looked ashen and exhausted, like he had no hope left at all.

“They have a weapon,” he gasped, his eyes gone huge and white.

Hasdrubal smiled, pointing to the bomb. “And so do we.”

Arabo shook his head. “Not like that. We’ve seen it working with our eyes. Seeing something like that, what it can do… it tests the faith, General.”

“Something like what?” asked Hasdrubal gently. “What has Rome bought here now?”

“It sounds insane,” said Arabo. “Like a story from far away. But the Romans have men whose hands are no longer flesh. They’re metal, like the hilt of a sword. And they have a way of… of shooting light”—

He looked grimly up at his superior.

“It killed so many,” he said, “But our men have recovered one.”

Warily, he drew something from his cloak, heavy enough that it took both hands to lift. It was the heavy cylinder of a Dalek gun, and both the Monk and the Doctor would have greeted it with horror.

Hasdrubal squinted at it uncertainly.

“It doesn’t look especially threatening,” he said.

“Neither does that,” said Arabo, nodding up to the nuclear missile. “There are those who say it isn’t a weapon at all. That your woman’s tricked us on behalf of Rome. They’ve taken us for fools so much already.”

“There are those who said our city would now be ash, too. I don’t know if the Monk will truly help us win. But I know we’ll lose for sure if we give in to despair.”

Arabo looked at him in a very odd way.

“Permission to speak frankly, General,” he said. 

“Of course. About what?”

“About _that_. You’re giving me permission to speak frankly. It’s not how I expected you to be, when I heard you were taking command. We all heard the rumours.”

Hasdrubal laughed. “Not rumours. All true. Condemned to death for how bad a general I was. I knew I wasn’t the best my people could hope for.”

“But it’s more than that,” said Arabo. “The way you treated your men, the things you _did._ We expected you to be a tyrant, and you’re here refusing meals”—

Before he could continue there was a flash of movement behind Hasdrubal, and instantly panic took all his thoughts away.

“Assassin!” he cried. “Behind you, General!”

Hasdrubal moved like he wasn’t alarmed at all; like fighting for his life was just some boring routine. His sword was beside him at all times, and in a second it was swinging through air at the invader. It struck the armourless man clean on the arm— then glanced off as if he was covered in iron. Hasdrubal grunted as he struck again and again, but each time the flesh stood firm as the hardest metal.

With a roar, he bought his sword vertically down on the man. He was fine, but the shirt he was wearing wasn’t: it sliced in half to reveal something green underneath—

Arabo flinched and Hasdrubal didn’t. The side of the sword hit the green pulp with a whack and the assassin was thrown backwards, before he keeled over like something an awful lot heavier than a man.

He hit the ground with a _clang_ , like a body shouldn’t.

“There are things like this in the world,” said Hasdrubal dryly, “and what scares you is how I’ve become honourable.”

“There’s been a lot that has been unexpected, for all of us,” said Arabo. “And when _you_ don’t expect it you send for”—

“The woman,” growled Hasdrubal. “Summon the Monk.”

“Maybe I’ll get the measure of you yet, General,” said Arabo, and his smile only fell slightly when Hasdrubal didn’t laugh.

”It doesn’t matter how well you know me,” he said, “or even the man that I am. What saves us now is how well she knows _us_ , and whether our faith will be repaid. Carthage needs the Monk, Arabo. With everything that’s been happening, well. Who else could handle a war that goes like this?”


	8. Chapter 8

“I can’t take this,” said the Doctor. “It’s absurd!”

“It’s no weirder than your box,” said Chris.

“My box is excellent,” said the Doctor. “It blends in. _This?_ It blends _out_ , is what it does.”

She hammered her fists on the back of the Monk’s machine.

“ _MONK!_ ” she shouted. “I know you’re in there! You can bloody well hear me out here!”

The back of the machine clicked open and a frizzy-haired head poked out.

“What is it now, Doctor?” said the Monk grumpily. “You going to tell me how I should always brush my teeth?”

“ _This_ ,” said the Doctor. “Your TARDIS. Why did you make it look like that?”

The Monk came out to look at her TARDIS also, which was jangling cheerfully and beeping electronic sounds. It had taken the form of a large arcade cabinet, of the kind you weren’t likely to find in the time before Christ had been born. It was black and covered in ugly designs, with the words _MS. MONK!_ in neon on the side.

“Like this?” shrugged the Monk. “It’s because I’m a woman now.”

“Not _that!_ Why have it like this at all? A video game console doesn’t belong in Ancient Carthage!”

“An arcade machine isn’t a video games console,” said Chris. “You don’t know anything.”

“I just modified how it’s disguised,” said the Monk. “When my TARDIS lands it makes a big list of the most appropriate forms it could take, then chooses whatever ends up at the bottom.”

“But that’s a terrible idea,” said the Doctor. “It’s”—

Before she could finish space wobbled a bit around her, and both Time Lords recoiled from the shock.

Chris looked at them, confused. “What have you heard?” she said.

“It’s a different sense from hearing,” said the Doctor. “We have it; humans don’t. Like when you hear an explosion that’s so close by, it might be you who’s doing the exploding.”

Chris looked in horror at her friend, then in greater horror at the Monk.

“ _You’re_ scared,” she said to the Doctor’s foe. “I didn’t think that you could be.”

The Monk wasn’t listening to her, just looking absently into space.

“Not yet!” she cried. “It can’t be happening yet, I’m not _ready_ ”—

There was a sound like someone unblocking a sewer, and Chris’s mother exploded from thin air.

The Monk stared at her. “You’re not the end of everything,” she said, in a way that was slightly annoyed.

“Feels like I am,” said Lorna, croaking. “Like water’s gone up my nose, then just kept right on going.” She looked angrily at the Doctor. “You might have thought to mention that would happen.”

“ _She’s_ why you’re here?” said the Monk. “That’s funny. She was just saying how it was wrong, bringing clapped out things from the nineteen eighties.”

“That’s my _mum!_ ” said Chris. “Don’t be mean to her.”

“Quite right,” said Lorna. “I’m here to deal with you.”

The Monk raised an eyebrow. “And how’re you going to do that?”

“She’ll give you a stern talking to,” said the Doctor. “It’s a lot more effective than it sounds.”

“I will!” said Lorna, who had forgotten why she was there. Her whole head felt like it had been at the bottom of a swimming pool: heavy and groggy like it might still be half underwater. She knew the Doctor wanted her to launch into a furious defence of all history yet to come, but all she could think in was—

“You sound like you’re from Manchester,” she said to the Monk.

The Monk cackled. “Is that wrong?”

“No! Just before I met the Doctor, I thought that aliens… that you’d sound like you were from somewhere else. Not from just down the road.”

“People from anywhere can sound like anything,” said the Doctor. “Even from just down the road.”

“Touching,” said the Monk. “When you’re done saving planets, you’ll be great in the greetings card industry.”

Lorna smiled despite herself, then winced when she saw that the Doctor had seen.

“It is true, you know,” she said. “Sometimes you do sound a bit trite.”

“That’s one thing,” said the Monk. “But it’s not the only way.”

Lorna looked at her. “The only way?”

“That she’s like a greeting card. Leave things out, don’t they? Big on the _Glad you’re getting married_ , less with the _shame that it isn’t to me_. You know there’s so much that she hadn’t told you.”

She gave a conspiratorial smile.

“You want to know how this war started?” she said.

“You don’t,” said the Doctor.

“Oh, I definitely do,” said Lorna, “if she doesn’t want me to know.”

“Lorna; _Chris_ is here”—

“I want to hear too!” said Chris. “I’ve seen what’s happening here anyway.”

Her mother sighed.

“You’ve brought be me here to fight for you, Doctor,” she said. “I have to know what you’re fighting for. And so does Christina, if you want her to stick with you too.”

“She’ll twist things,” the Doctor said.

“Yes. But she won’t pretend anything else.”

The Doctor sighed, knowing she was beaten.

“Don’t get taken in by her,” she said, throwing up her hands.

“Carthage must be destroyed,” said the Monk. “That’s what Rome’s been saying. It’s too close to it, too powerful. There’s no telling what it might do. Except it hasn’t done anything; it didn’t want to fight. But the Romans always find a way to war.”

The Monk narrowed her eyes, looking out to the starving city.

“First they asked for the children,” she said. “To take so many hostage, as a gesture of goodwill. So Carthage did that, but the giving still wasn’t enough. Rome asked for all their weapons, for everything they could use to fight. And this city said _yes_ ; they were really that desperate for peace. And once they’d given up absolutely everything,” the Monk said, “Rome said they’d be burned to the ground.”

“That’s _awful!_ ” said Chris. She turned to the Doctor. “How can you let that happen?! How can you think that you’re _good?_ ”

With her senses that were better than she always pretended they were, the Doctor could hear someone running towards them, down from the citadel that stood at the top of the hill. They were shouting the Monk’s name and sounded frantic, and it wouldn’t be long until they reached the machine where they were.

This might not be an argument she could win. But maybe she only had to drag it out.

“They didn’t let it happen,” she said. “Carthage kept up the fight. They’d lost all their weapons, so they made some new ones instead. Coins into swords, hair cut off to make catapult strings. Melting everything down into what they really need. Somewhere out there, there’s a me who would really approve. And I’m dead jealous of her,” she said as she glared at the Monk, “‘cause she’ll never have to deal with _you_. I’ve not told you what the Monk’s planning, Lorna. She’s given them a _nuclear bomb_ ”—

“ _MONK!_ ” bellowed a voice that was now close by. “You here by your… thing that you have?”

“I’m here, Arabo,” said the Monk as the voice’s owner pulled up beside her. “There’s no need to go about shouting, is there?”

“There was a Roman,” said Arabo, “who tried to kill the General. But his skin was like metal, and his stomach was an eye”—

Once again, the Monk lost her swagger completely. She stared at him like she didn’t know what was happening, because she knew enough to be overwhelmed that it was.

”Oh Hell,” said the Doctor. “So there _was_ a need to go about shouting.”

“I have to go,” said the Monk.

“Think I have to, too,” said the Doctor.

Arabo frowned at her. “You’re a monk too?”

“Sort of. Medicine and religion; at this point they’re basically the same thing.” She frowned. “And in this case, I think that’s entirely justified.”

She looked at everyone individually to try and get back some control.

“We’ll talk about all this later,” she said to Chris and her mother. “About everything. But we both need to go for now. Save something bigger than the world. You should get to the TARDIS, both of you. I think you should get there _now_.”

”You should,” said the Monk, as sincere as she never was. “You need to get out of here.”

“The Romans are coming,” said Chris.

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “The Romans. You won’t want to see what they do.”

Chris had noticed it a long time ago, how the Doctor got worse at lying the more and more scared that she got. But now it felt like she wasn’t even trying, and that was enough to scare Chris as well. She’d seen what made the Doctor frightened. She couldn’t imagine the thing that would make her like this.

Like so many children, she knew what to do in this situation. You pretended you knew less than you did, went along with the lie you were stupid. Children spent so much time protecting adults. They probably didn’t even realise how exhausting it could be.

“I’ve seen enough of Carthage,” she said. “I don’t want to see when they die.”

“No,” said the Doctor. “Nobody should. Stay safe,” she added. “Both of you.”

The two Time Lords started to run up the hill, the Monk’s plastic jacket flapping as they went. Arabo ran some distance behind, pretending it was only the hunger that made him slower.

“Who’s actually coming?” said Chris once the three of them were gone.

“The Romans, honey,” said her mother. “You already heard it was the Romans.”

Sometimes it was rubbish, being eleven.


	9. Chapter 9

The Monk was more herself again by the time she burst into the citadel with the Doctor. She’d had long enough to come to terms with the threat she now knew was arriving, and arguing with her frenemy the whole way up the hill had done a lot to brighten her mood.

“Old Hazza!” she said as she ran up to meet the general. “Hasdrubal! The man with the megatons!”

“ _Old Hazza?_ ” he said.

“Now someone else is doing this,” said the Doctor, “I can see how it’s really annoying.”

Her face was still cheery despite everything, but it wavered as she took in the hydrogen bomb for the first time. Then below it she saw what was on the stomach of the man on the ground— and after that she looked like she had never smiled at all.

“It’s all as Arabo said, then,” she said quietly. “Good God. Sometimes even Time Lords have to pray.”

“Isn’t praying what you’d both be used to?” said Hasdrubal in a voice just as glum as the Doctor. “If you’re _both_ monks.”

“Oh yeah,” said the Doctor. “Incredibly religious, that’s me.”

Hasdrubal looked anguished. “But you’re both”—

“Oh, we can’t go doing this every time,” said the Monk. “We’re women, we’re clever; write a blog about it on the internet. I might go inventing that,” she smiled, “once I’ve blown up Ancient Rome.”

Hasdrubal frowned. “That’s my decision to make,” he said. “And you know I hope it won’t come to that.”

“It won’t,” said the Doctor. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“Oh,” said Hasdrubal. “I’d assumed you were working together.”

“Reluctantly,” said the Monk. “The Doctor doesn’t agree with what I’m doing. She’s from a different school of thought.”

“Hippocratic?”

The Monk laughed. “Sounds a bit like it.”

The Doctor scowled, but before she could respond Arabo had run up to them, flushed red with exhaustion in a way that the Time Lords weren’t. He’d fallen some way behind them as they’d both bolted up over the hill, to the point he couldn’t pretend it was due to hunger alone. They _were_

_something beyond human, though he hated having to admit it. The Monk wasn’t the sort of person he was inclined to trust, not just because of her gender._

__

“I saw the army massing on the way,” he said to Hasdrubal. “Men spilling out of the fort, far more than we usually see. It could just be training or nothing at all. But I think that we need to be ready.”

__

Hasdrubal’s face grew stern. “The assassin had an eye on his stomach!” he cried. The monks are only just back here, Arabo; you know that. However much I’m needed in battle, the knowledge they have”—

__

“About that,” said the Monk as she looked at the man on the ground. “We don’t really have any. “Will do, soon enough. But we’re going to be at this for a while.”

__

Hasdrubal sighed.

__

“It would be very bad for morale,” he said tersely. “If it turned out you didn’t know what you were doing. We might have to schedule an execution or two.”

__

“No need for that,” said the Doctor. “We’re good at what we do. The very best at monking, that’s us two. Only this? It’s something that…well.”

__

She trailed off and looked Hasdrubal straight in the eyes.

__

“Do you have faith?” she asked him.

__

Hasdrubal laughed. “In the gods? It has been tried, of late.”

__

“In _you_. In Carthage; the bricks and the people, you know it’s all the same. Do you think that when it comes down to it, you’ll be able to see this fight through? To beat Rome back, even turn it away forever?”

__

“Yes,” said Hasdrubal, so quickly it took even Arabo by surprise. “Maybe it’s stupid, to say it like that and out loud.”

__

The Doctor shook her head. “It never is. Wherever you are, you always try and find a way through. But where _we_ are, all four of us… the finding it might take a while. Even if you’re”—

__

“Very good at monking?” said Hasdrubal acidly.

__

“You’re a quick learner, Hasdrubal, I’ll give you that,” said the Doctor with a smile. “It’s a hell of a fight for all of us, what’s coming.”

__

“She’s underselling it,” said the Monk. “Haz, the thing you’re fighting can’t be killed by swords. You must know that, right? In your heart, beneath all those rippling muscles.”

__

“Are you telling me to abandon faith?” said Hasdrubal. “Maybe your friend’s a better monk than you.”

__

The Monk scowled as the Doctor tried not to look smug.

__

“Don’t trust her,” they both said to Hasdrubal simultaneously.

__

For an instant the General almost looked amused, before he growled and started striding from the citadel. Arabo ran along behind him, doing a bad job of hiding just how exhausted he was.

__

“That was a bad thing you did there,” said the Monk once the two men were both gone. “We don’t give hope to the damned.”

__

“No,” said the Doctor, “but there’s things even worse than false hope. He has that; the bomb doesn’t fall. Leaves me free to deal with the other stuff that’s here.”

__

She knelt down to join the Monk beside the fallen man. Most of him looked utterly ordinary, just like the citadel did. There was only the gouge of green on his stomach to remind them that everything was doomed. An open yellow eye gazed out from his ruined belly, seeing nothing, revealing just enough.

__

“A Dalek,” said the Doctor. “‘Course it was. Not a complete one; wouldn’t be viable on its own. But further along than either of us would’ve feared.”

__

“Not so sure about that,” said the Monk with contempt. “These days even the best of us are monsters. Hasdrubal’s fighting for peace, y’know. He’s doing everything you say a good man should.”

__

The Doctor sighed.

__

“I know,” she said. “Of course I know. I’ve been around for thousands of years, I’ve had a lot of time to be told that I’m a hypocrite”—

__

She stopped talking as she saw what was in her enemy’s hand.

__

“Monk,” she said. “Tell me that’s not”— 

__

“It bloody is!” said the Monk through an enormous grin. “Seismic screwdriver. Like sonic, only more so.”

__

She flicked her wrist and deafening bangs howled from her device, causing alarming amounts of masonry to crumble down from the roof. In the distance a flock of birds squawked and flew away, and the Doctor’s face looked like it was doing a good impression of whatever they must have been feeling.

__

The Monk looked nonchalantly at her device.

__

“Says he’s dead,” she said. “So now we know.”

__

An anguished sound came from somewhere near the bottom of the Doctor’s throat. She rose to her feet to yell something clever at the Monk, but as she did she caught sight of the hydrogen bomb. It was huge and it had a gravity to it, and as she looked at it she felt her anger fall down into fear.

__

“The world isn’t a joke,” she said. “No matter how much you need it to be. The way you’re going, where it leads”—

__

She gulped.

__

“I’ve seen it before,” she said. “What a nuclear bomb can do.”

__

“But you’ve not seen what an army does, have you?” said the Monk quietly. “Not for a while now. In the places you never go, to the people you’ll never save. You’ve not seen what happens when an oath of peace comes against a war.”

__

The Doctor felt like she knew what would happen very well, looking up at the nuclear bomb. The Monk’s attitude had shaken her as much as her seismic screwdriver had, and things that she’d once felt were certain now seemed to be cracking apart.

__

“You were nothing,” said the Doctor, taking in the Monk and the bomb. “And everyone forgot how dangerous you could be.”

__

The Monk smiled. “Didn’t think I’d be a problem for you again, did you? But that’s the thing about history. You don’t always get to choose what’s left behind. Sometimes the future looks more like the past than you’d think.”

__

She prodded the eye on the corpse’s stomach and sighed.

__

“And soon, of course,” she said, “it all might look exactly the same.”

__

“We don’t know if that’s what this is,” the Doctor said, just a fraction too quickly.

__

“Oh, give it a rest,” said the Monk, and her voice was friendly when she did. “We were all in denial for a bit. The time for that’s over now. It _is_ coming, Doctor. Even if you ignore it or run away. All that means is not being ready when it comes.”

__

Her fellow Time Lord couldn’t meet her gaze.

__

“Funny, isn’t it?” said the Doctor. “I’m all about fighting your fears. Only now they’re _mine_ , and all of it’s so different! Like I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid.”

__

“You’re holding onto something that might’ve once been hope,” said the Monk. “But it isn’t; not anymore. It’s been a burden to you for such a long, long time. And you need to let it go to make things real.”

__

She looked half-pleadingly into the Doctor’s eyes.

__

“Friends,” she said. “Sometimes, when it matters. You know what you’d say to someone in your shoes. And you _are_ in your shoes, right? So you need to say it to you. Out loud, to the world. And then you’ll really know.”

__

The Doctor thought it would be fine to look at the ground as she said it. But the enormity of it was telling her that wasn’t going to be enough. A truth like this wasn’t something you could hesitate against. When you said you knew it was there, you had to look it in its face.

__

She looked at the Monk, her jaw held tight. Neither of them looked like joking now. They had the faces of soldiers who’d seen too many wars, who knew they’d still never seen something as bad as the thing that was coming. They were exhausted and beaten down.

__

But they were not yet beaten.

__

“The Shape of the Dalek,” said the Doctor. “All of space and time transforming, so it’s only the Daleks forever. I’ve been saying it’s coming for ages. But it isn’t, is it? ‘Cause it’s already started. The Shape is already here.”

__

The Monk nodded, slightly but firmly, patting the Dalek-scarred stomach with her hand.

__

The Doctor finally let herself look to the ground, and sighed.

__

“I thought that would help,” she said. “But I’m still absolutely terrified.”

__

“You’d be mad if you weren’t,” said the Monk. “It’s a scary world. The future’s broken; the past is coming back. You know what that means for us rebel Lords of Time?”

__

The Doctor snorted. “That we’re finished?”

__

“That we’re more important than we’ve ever been before.”

__

Despite everything the Monk had done in her many lives, the Doctor felt able to flash her a tiny smile.

__

The last of the sun had set over Carthage, and the two of them took to working in the darkness.

__


	10. Chapter 10

Although they’d never say it to each other, the Romans could feel that things were going wrong. It wasn’t just the tightening of their flesh, like their armour was becoming part of them. The world had gone wrong before their bodies had.

All of them knew the story Rome told of Carthage. A dangerous city ruled by a tyrant, to be crushed by a leader who was wise before his time. It had stopped being true, if it ever had been at all. Something bigger than they knew was starting to happen here.

There were very quiet whispers that Scipio had gone insane. Why else would he have led them _here_ , to the thickest wall of the city? They’d known he’d meant to attack where he wasn’t expected, but there was a good reason why they wouldn’t be expected here. No army could break through defences as well built as this.

No _human_ army, was a thing they didn’t think.

_“SOLDIERS!”_ roared Scipio, and that was odd as well. The men at the back of the ranks would laugh about it, how the leaders always had their speech from far away. They were meant to inspire everyone, but no one could ever hear them— they were the kind of thing you tolerated from a man who could put you to death.

That wasn’t true now, though: they could all hear their general very clearly. His voice bellowed over all of them in a way that no man’s should— even the very greatest of them, even those blessed by the Gods.

_“YOU KNOW WHAT BRINGS OUR PEOPLE GLORY!”_ Scipio boomed. _“IT IS NOT JUST THE STRENGTH WE BRING TO WAR! WE ARE A PEOPLE OF LAW AND STRUCTURE, WHO GIVE A NEW GRACE TO THE WORLD! WE ARE THE GREATEST MEN TO HAVE WALKED UPON THIS EARTH! WE_ ARE _THE SUPERIOR BEINGS!”_

He gestured to the city with hands that were no longer right, though the men at the back couldn’t see that. They were only staring at a distant blob in the darkness, hoping that his speech would soon be done.

_“THIS CITY!”_ Scipio suddenly bellowed out of nowhere, _“IS MORE THAN BRICKS AND MORTAR! IT IS A MOCKERY OF WHAT WE ARE! A LESSER CITY FULL OF LESSER MEN! WAITING TO POUNCE UPON US! TO STRANGLE US IF WE SLEEP! BUT WE WILL NOT SLEEP! WE DO NOT REST! WE ARE THE GLORY OF ROME, AND CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED!”_

With a sound like a boiler blowing apart two lights emerged from Scipio’s helmet, blaring brighter than anything a Roman would ever have seen. The glare of them reflected off his eyes, which were now as hard and thick as unbreakable glass.

It was right for an army to be afraid of its leader. Yet the Romans at the back of the crowd sensed they were feeling the wrong kind of fear.

The ones at the front were cheering, though, and their cheers were transforming too. Some of them crackled with an electric hiss, others rasped like vocal cords coming undone. They were the cheers a person makes as they transform into something that would never cheer at all.

The soldiers couldn’t see how else their comrades had changed. One now had his sword fused right into his hand, another’s studded armour had hardened to a shell. But they could see that one man was rising up into the air, and that he no longer had any legs at all.

_“WE CAME HERE WITH ONE PURPOSE,”_ Scipio bellowed, _“AND TONIGHT IT WILL BE ACHIEVED! ROMANS CONQUER AND DESTROY! CARTHAGE MUST BE OBLITERATED! WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT?”_

The army couldn’t see how the hovering man’s hand was becoming a plunger, how his _other_ hand was warping into a gun. And they couldn’t see his awful grin, which was even more terrifying than those. But all of them could hear as he gave an electric roar—

_“ANNIHILATE,”_ he screeched in a no-longer human voice.

A burst of light and sound came out of everywhere, like the Gods themselves were falling down. Many of the men gave into terror and scrambled to run away, but before they did the glare of the light was gone—

—and the wall was, too, the defences turned to smoke.

_“ONWARDS!”_ bellowed Scipio, and the whole army cheered at that. They were very good at cheering, almost as good as at war. If you cheered hard and long enough, you might forget how scared you really were— and whatever terrors the cheers were now masking, they no longer had anything to do with Carthage.


	11. Chapter 11

Hasdrubal and Arabo had no idea why the Romans were massing by the widest wall in the city. There were soldiers on guard _everywhere_ – just in case – but the ones at the best defences wouldn’t have to take their jobs too seriously. A wall this thick would protect Carthage, whatever its people did.

“I still think it’s a trap,” said Arabo as they came up near the wall. “It has to be. They’re making a big show of putting most of their army here, so they can sneak their best men elsewhere to break them through.”

“It’s an odd sort of trap, if that’s what it is,” said Hasdrubal. “That’s near enough the whole of their army out there. If they’re going to surprise us, they won’t have many soldiers.”

“Maybe a few’s all they think they need,” said Arabo.

“Hopefully,” said Hasdrubal. “I’d have thought they’d know not to underestimate us by now.”

Arabo gritted his teeth.

“General,” he said delicately. “However much fight we have in us, at some point our army does have to eat. Rome only has to wait us out until we starve.”

Hasdrubal laughed. “You say that like you think it’s obvious.”

“Well… _yes._ Of course I do.”

Hasdrubal gleamed. “Because you’ve not seen what’s even more obvious than that. Tell me, Arabo— _when was the last time you were hungry?_ ”

Arabo hesitated. He’d felt he was starving, true enough— but as a child he’d known what real hunger was. He’d had days without food that seemed like they’d never end, and which _weren’t_ as many as he’d been without food right now—

“I don’t know,” Arabo said softly, “what it is that you mean to imply”—

Before Hasdrubal could tell him, the wall exploded. A scorch of light and sound grew like the sun gone wrong, and all either of them knew for moments was the brightening roar.

The heat and light were still awful when Arabo raised his head. All that mattered was that they were bearable; whatever the damage they did. Somehow he was uninjured; impossibly Hasdrubal was as well.

As he squinted into the brightness he saw the first of the Romans breaking through, and realised he would need many more words for _impossible._

Carthage’s men had recovered quickly from the explosion, as soldiers should. Yet as Arabo watched he saw a Roman thrust forward with one hand, which had turned into something not unlike the sucker of a squid. Arabo’s stomach was still racing from the shock of the blast, but he was sure what he was seeing was real— the soldier screaming as the once-hand attached to his face, howls getting louder as his body dissolved into steam.

“They’re not men anymore,” he said to Hasdrubal from his viewpoint on the ground. The general was already on his feet with his sword drawn, and even as monsters were invading he’d gotten the attention of his army.

“Perhaps they were never men,” muttered Hasdrubal dismissively.

“Perhaps,” said Arabo, failing to disguise his skepticism, “but what they are now might be unbeatable.”

“DID YOU HEAR THAT?” shouted Hasdrubal out loud, not to Arabo but to the soldiers massed around. His voice was carrying too far, just as Scipio’s had, but its loudness was warm and human where the other’s was harsh and cold.

The soldiers looked confused, as they hadn’t heard Arabo at all.

“My advisor says these monsters are unbeatable!” Hasdrubal continued to boom. “That Rome may always have crushed us, even when it was made up of men. And _you’ve_ thought that, too! Of course you have! The man who feels no terror at this hour is _less_ of a man than them!”

He was pointing at the warping Romans like he wasn’t scared of them at all. Hasdrubal was transforming too, Arabo then knew. It had taken him this long to finally accept it.

“There is no shame in fear!” Hasdrubal cried. “Shame only comes to those who run from horrors. Weaker metals perish in the fire,” he said as his sword swept the air, “but we are the people of the furnace! We have been pummelled and broken in the flames, and through them we have been reforged!”

As he was speaking a laser slammed through the air towards him, but with a flick of his sword he batted it away— just as all the laws of physics would say that he shouldn’t have been able to do. Somewhere science was screaming as loud as history. It wasn’t just Carthage that was being remade.

Hasdrubal deflected another laser, then another, and his soldiers were looking at him with something more than pride. They were turning round and utterly ready to fight, and somehow it seemed like they now might be evenly matched. With determination they ran towards the Romans, and as they did the final battle for their city’s existence began.

“I was condemned to die before this city was!” Hasdrubal roared. “And I _still_ stand tall now, far more than the man I was! To be told we will die is a command for us to live! To show there is always hope, until the very moment when we end!”

 _None of that matters_ , Arabo thought to himself. _You can’t fight men of metal with a sword._

In front of him a soldier slashed at an altered Roman, the red steel of its armour shattering with the blow.

“We are forged from something stronger than metal!” Hasdrubal shouted. “That’s what Rome has never understood!”

Privately as he got up to fight, Arabo thought there was a lot more than that which nobody here understood. But those things maybe meant he would live, for some hours longer at least.

He roared furiously, and swung iron at space-age materials. The alien metal screeched, breaking like it was glass.

Even the soldiers could hear as time started to grind and scream.


	12. Chapter 12

The night had worn long enough that the Doctor was too tired to worry about anachronisms. She was surrounded by tools from the future of this time period: blood testing equipment and metal detectors all lit by electric light from her torch. With a stethoscope she was listening to the chest of the corpse on the floor, hoping desperately to hear something other than silence.

Her eyes were too embarrassed to meet the Monk’s due to just how much history she was changing.

An enormous rumble boomed through the Citadel and the Doctor’s glare flicked up to scold her friend, but the Monk’s head was down, her screwdriver far from her hands. Whatever was causing the sound was far down in the city below, and it was a long way from anything that got put into the history books.

“It’s already wrong, isn’t it?” said the Doctor with a sigh. “History’s falling to bits, no matter if we’re here or not.”

“It’s been that way for a while,” said the Monk. “You want to change history, you have to know what it looks like before you do. It was wrong before us, before the Daleks.”

“You don’t know much about Carthage, do you?” she said. “Nobody really bothers with it. But Hasdrubal who you’ve never heard of; he’s not supposed to be as good he is here. He should be a tyrant, hoarding what food there is for his friends. But instead he’s”—

“Noble,” said the Doctor. “Because that’s a better story. It doesn’t work if Rome burns down a city of awful men. But if they were to do it to _heroes_ ”—

“You know more about stories than me,” said the Monk. “But it’s powerful, isn’t it? A city no one’s heard of standing up to something huge, to say that they _won’t_ be destroyed. But if they lose, then it’s powerful in all the wrong ways. Says the wrong side wins, that _evil_ wins. And that can’t happen. So that’s where yours truly comes in.”

The Doctor nodded. “You think history’s shifting into a shape that’s resisting the Daleks. That it’s weaponising a narrative, but you’ll have to give it a shove. And you’re not too fussed who gets killed along the way.”

“Yes. And a hero would do the same, if she were trying.”

“I _am_ trying!” said the Doctor, somehow looking angry with her cheeks.

The Monk snorted. “Trying the patience!”

“Not that,” said the Doctor. “I tried to find the centre of it all. It’s not coming naturally, the shape of the Dalek. There’s something that’s causing it, helping it to appear. A beam focussed on the time that Chris is from, shattering reality as it goes. It’s not just this place that’s different. History’s changing, everyone’s getting angry”—

The Monk laughed. “ _That’s_ why you think everyone’s angry? You don’t get out much, for someone who’s exploring all the time.”

“It’s held together by a six-dimensional lens,” said the Doctor, ignoring her. “Built of things I’ve found in all of the futures I’ve seen. Small and blue, like bits of old Meccano— but part of something bigger, pointing to something huge. I used the TARDIS to plot where the centre should be. But when I got here it turned out I only found _you_ ”— 

The Monk let out a _boom_ with her seismic screwdriver and the Doctor jumped, startled into silence by the din.

The Doctor glared at her friend. “What’d you do _that_ for?” she said.

“You were going on,” said the Monk. “We’d be sitting here all night if nothing interrupted you. I was going to say, anyway. Maybe _I’m_ the centre; you must’ve thought that. It could be me that you’re looking for.”

The Doctor looked mildly offended by that suggestion. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “What’s causing this is _huge_. And you’re, well. You’ve never been one of the biggest movers and shakers”—

“You’re not getting it. Maybe the centre isn’t what destroys you, but what _saves_ you. Like someone or something has set all of this up just to point you where you need to go.”

The Doctor looked into the Monk’s eyes to confirm her friend was joking, then felt her jaw drop when she saw how earnest they were.

The two Time Lords stared open-mouthed at each other before a while, before the Doctor suddenly started laughing from the bottom of her belly.

“It’s not that funny,” said the Monk in an injured voice. “Help’s not always found in the likely places.”

“Ha! It’s not that I’m laughing about. This is what it’s like for _them_ , isn’t it? Being patronised. Someone who thinks they know you, that they sound like you, trying to save you and getting it all so wrong.”

The Monk gave her a very small smile. “That sounds a bit like a cry for help.”

“Well, you could write the book on those, I’m sure.”

The Monk didn’t rise to the bait. Instead she looked serious and gaunt, the lines on her face lit by the flicker of explosions far below. She smiled again, but in a warm, sad way, like she was talking to someone who she knew had a terminal illness.

“You are in danger, Doctor,” she said softly. “Perhaps you’ve not realised just how much. You think after this you’ll go off on more mad adventures. But you won’t. The Shape is when everything ends.”

The Doctor shook her head. “Even if I know that, I can’t let myself believe it. It always has to _appear_ like there’s some hope”—

“So I’ve heard. That you’ll win against this threat the same as always. That’s what the people who know about you say, that your story goes on forever. But they’ve been saying it more often these days, like it’s something desperate. It’s almost as if they stopped thinking it’s really true”—

The Doctor looked down, unable to meet the Monk’s eyes. It only meant she met the eye of the dead Roman’s stomach, staring up as if it was judging her too. The Monk was examining this corpse to arm herself for what was coming, but deep down the Doctor knew that wasn’t her own motivation. She was looking for a way out, a sign that it wasn’t all true. Even here she was trying to run, like light sucking down a black hole.

“If I were to join you,” she said. “It’d mean giving up everything I’ve stood for and believed in; burning down what I’ve spent my lives protecting. Even at my darkest I wouldn’t drop this bomb. _You_ wouldn’t either, not if you could avoid it. And we _can_ avoid it, ‘cause we need to. We have to be better than this.”

The Monk scowled. “Don’t act like I’m worse than what I was. I was fine with the Daleks once. I was _friends_ with them! But I hate them now, because I saw what they really were. That’s what’s great, isn’t it, about being the people we are? That we’re all capable of the most incredible change”—

“You’re not a hero, Monk. You’re talking about blowing up a city; that’s not worth a motivational speech. I’m different; I have a code.”

“And you think I don’t?”

“I think you change things for the hell of it and grin when they explode. My name has a meaning; a definition. I’ve never known who _the Monk_ was supposed to be.”

“You still don’t get it, do you? A monk’s who you call when the doctors can’t win. When so many people have told you there’s _no_ chance that you’ll take the desperate one, even if it’s stupid, because nothing’s ever so awful as not even trying at all.”

The Monk scowled.

“The same old stories, the same old ways.” She put on her strange high voice. “ _You can’t change history!_ Except now it _is_ changing, right? It’s changing into what we always knew it would.”

“This isn’t about that,” said the Doctor. “It’s this planet’s future, the whole world that’s to come”—

“ _The shape of the Dalek_ ,” said the Monk, who wasn’t even listening. “You think that future’ll be safe from it now it’s here? Do you think its _children_ will be?”

She chuckled.

“I don’t blame you, you understand. You were just trying to keep them safe. But you’ve put them in danger, haven’t you? You’ve put them in more danger than they’ve ever known”—

“I’ve not aimed a weapon at them,” said the Doctor pointedly. “I’m doing everything I can so that none of them have to die.”

As she said that a lasered flash lit the the citadel bright, and more masonry tumbled from the roof that was high above. The words seemed hollow now, even to her.

“You don’t need me to tell you,” said the Monk. “It’s a fact that you always keep running from. You can keep a child away from what history really is, for a while. But sometimes history will still come to swallow the child.”

She looked out to the stars beyond the citadel, though the large hole she’d blown for her hydrogen bomb to launch through. For a moment anyone could believe she was thinking of the children in Rome and Carthage and I’m Manchester, that she wanted a way to save all of them forever too.

“The way I see it,” she said, “change and the Daleks; they’re the only two constants in life. Before this is over, Doctor, you _will_ have to choose which one you think’s the scarier.”

They both looked down to the Dalek on the stomach again.

“It won’t come to that,” said the Doctor tersely, failing even to convince herself.

“Of course it won’t. If it _does_ , you’ll just deny it. That’s your oath, isn’t it? You’ll let everything die if it means you’re still able to be pure.”

“Not when it really matters. That’s not what being the Doctor means.”

“Perhaps that’s what you tell yourself. But I know what _the Doctor_ ’s always meant to me. For as long as that’s the touchstone of what you are?”

The Monk waggled her screwdriver to indicate herself, then her.

“Enemies,” she continued. “Maybe it’s for the best.”


	13. Chapter 13

Some time earlier when night was still to fall, Lorna and her daughter were making their way to the TARDIS. The sky had darkened to almost the exact same blue as their box, and the clouds were as dull and red as the paint that was splattered on its sides.

Lorna wasn’t feeling like she was blending into Carthage quite so well. Along with Christina she stood out from the people they passed, and not just because of their clothes. She didn’t like to think of herself as _fat_ – and Christina had never had much weight to speak of at all – but both of them were huge compared to anyone here in the city.

The people looked _hungry_ as they stared at them, Lorna thought, and weren’t even trying to disguise it. Had things become that bad here, that eating people was becoming an option? She wasn’t in much of a hurry to find out.

“I don’t know about this, Chrissy,” she said. “It’s not the sort of place I thought she’d take you to. In my head it was all bouncy castles on bouncy planets. Not people going hungry in a war.”

“It wasn’t on purpose,” said Chris with her hands balled into her pockets. “The Doctor didn’t want us to come here.”

“That’s good. I wouldn’t want you here either.”

Lorna looked down at her daughter and smiled gently.

“And you didn’t want me to come here, did you?” she said.

Chris looked uncomfortable. “It’s me and the Doctor’s thing.”

“Of course it is. I just wanted to be sure you were safe.”

_And you’re not_ , she added internally in her mind. Lorna had spent a lot of time feeling angry at other people, and she recognised that rage in the people of Carthage. They were looking at her like someone who didn’t understand, and of course they were right— she had no idea what it meant to know your city was about to die.

“It’s silly,” she said when she was sure no one was listening but her daughter. “We know awful things happened in the past, don’t we? But I don’t know I ever thought of them happening to _real people_ , just like us. It’s all seems different, when you get to see it for real.”

Chris didn’t answer her. She just looked glum as she scraped her trainers along the ground.

“I’m just saying that we’re lucky,” Lorna said slightly desperately to her daughter. “However grim things might seem. They might look bad, but at least we won’t die in a war”—

When Chris spoke she didn’t stop staring at the ground.

“That’s not what Joe’s dad used to say. He was always talking about that, when we were at his after school. That he thought we’d all die from nuclear weapons, and it would happen soon.”

“Yes,” said her mother. “I had words with him about that. Very strong ones, that I normally wouldn’t approve of at all.”

“There were things he said when you weren’t around to hear. It really scared me, when he talked about how quick it would be. I kept thinking about brushing my teeth then being dead, and only having seconds to know”—

She looked up at her mother, and she was trying not to cry.

—“the Monk has a nuclear bomb,” she added, very quietly.

Suddenly Lorna stopped thinking about the anger of the people beside them. There was only her daughter’s distress, and nothing more.

“Oh, Chrissy,” she said. “He should never have said that to you. It’s not okay to do that, not to someone your age. Anyway,” she added as she ruffled her daughter’s hair, “it didn’t happen to him, did it? It was all fine. He died for a completely different reason, without any of that nuclear war.”

“The Monk isn’t scared of it,” said Chris. “She thinks it’s _funny_. The Doctor wouldn’t be anything like that.”

“No,” said Lorna uncertainty. “But”—

She looked around at the starving city, hesitating.

“What would she be like?” she said. “What did she want me to do?”

Chris shrugged. “To help stop the Monk. So things go back to how they’re supposed to be.”

“But then everyone here will die, Christina.”

”I know. I don’t want that to happen at all. But the Doctor said it had to. That otherwise we wouldn’t be safe.”

“Did she, now?” said Lorna very quietly.

“I thought she was wrong,” said Chris.

“Then I raised you well,” said her mother. She was looking at a woman who was also looking at her, who must have been younger but who looked like she’d died long ago. There was a child in the woman’s hand and hatred in her eyes. There wasn’t any difference between them, except how Lorna wasn’t about to die.

“She trusts you, in a way,” said Chris. “She thinks you’ll know what to do.”

“Don’t worry, love,” said Lorna. “I know what to do, right enough.”

Everything was dark as they came back to the TARDIS, but Lorna knew it’d grow darker still before she could go to sleep. Before that, she would have to talk to the Doctor, and she’d be needing her strong words when she did.


	14. Chapter 14

It was many hours after that before the Doctor came back to the TARDIS too. Along with the Monk she’d tried everything she could think of to study the Dalek on the corpse’s stomach, though hours passed without any progress at all.

In the end, though, she had to leave, to get some sleep while she knew it was safe to do so. Her TARDIS was virtually indestructible— but anything could be destroyed once the Daleks began to arrive.

The Monk didn’t seem like she needed to sleep, somehow: the Doctor had left her working into the night. There’d be no sneaking up on the bomb as she snored away, then. If it was going to be defused, there would have to be another way.

It was as dark in the forest inside the TARDIS as it was in the city without, impossible stars in the sky that wasn’t there. Dark enough that the Doctor didn’t notice Lorna, until she gave a very loud cough to tell the Time Lord she was there.

“Oh!” said the Doctor with a start. “I’m glad you’re around, actually. The Monk’s been doing my head in, we’ve been sat up all night just _arguing_ ”—

“Why did you bring me here?” said Lorna very sharply.

“More arguing,” said the Doctor, trying not to groan. “That’s wicked.”

”Not answering the question, then?

The Doctor sighed. “It was needless, Lorna, that’s the truth of it. You could’ve gone out clubbing after all. I’m sorry about that, another happy night wasted”—

“I’m not bothered about that now,” said Lorna curtly. “I just don’t see why you brought me here at all. Christina says you’re going to _kill_ people. Why the hell did you think I’d go along with that?”

The Doctor stared at her, shocked at the implication, then gave a long and very heavy sigh. She flicked a switch on the TARDIS console so gentle light rose up from the floor, so they could see each other properly in the argument yet to come.

“Of course you’d think that’s what it was,” said the Doctor quietly. “I was panicking when I called for you; must have been. Didn’t stop to think it through. You reminded me of someone; that’s the truth of it. A friend who I had long ago.”

“A friend who got you to kill people?” said Lorna flatly.

Her arms were folded not just in anger, but over her stomach as if she was protecting herself. She was angry because she was afraid of her, the Doctor realised. Perhaps that had been true for longer than either of them knew.

“No!” said the Doctor, who then frowned. “Well, a bit. It didn’t feel like it at the time. It was a situation a bit like we’re in now: Ancient Rome, Pompeii about to explode”—

“A volcano isn’t an army,” said Lorna pointedly.

“What I mean is the responsibility went to my head,” said the Doctor, “And she bought me back from the brink. I almost ended up like the Monk— caught up in my own arguments, not giving a damn who I killed. But my friend saw there was another way, a human way”—

“To save them?”

The Doctor looked uncomfortable. “To save some of them. Maybe just one person or a family, but not no one. And I’ve never forgotten what that meant. When I’ve worried I’d go to my worst, I’ve always made myself remember. You’re a reminder to me, Lorna. Of what _good_ is.”

Lorna looked at the Doctor like her friend was confessing a murder.

“Your friend sounds nothing like me,” said Lorna coldly. “She’d’ve thought of herself as one of the ones you saved. But you left _thousands_ to die, didn’t you? And now you’re all grins and jokes. Like what you did means you can forget them, that it means anything saving just one”—

“It means a very great deal, if you’re the person who gets to survive.”

“But if you’re not,” said Lorna. “You’re _you_. And you let yourself forget.” Her fear had turned to anger now, real, boiling anger that made the Monk seem tame. Despite herself, the Doctor shrank back, her hands gripping the edge of the console, her eyes wary at where this was going to go.

“I don’t forget,” said the Doctor. “They’re all on my mind, truly, everyone I’ve ever failed.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Lorna. “It’s the saving that lets you forget, isn’t it? I’ve been there too. You want so much to be a good person, you’ll do anything to ignore how it isn’t true.”

The Doctor laughed, softly and coldly. She’d tried so hard to be compassionate, to understand. But the Monk was cackling in her head, and something was thrumming hard against a dam.

“You really think you see the big picture, don’t you?” she said with a crack in her voice.

Lorna laughed. “You often don’t seem to yourself.”

“‘Cause that’s what I’ve let you believe. I’m a god from space with a medical degree. You don’t always realise how much I really know.”

The Doctor sighed and waved a hand in an absent way. As she did the stars above them grew sharp white, so bright that they were as dazzling as the sun. She squinted as she looked up with sad eyes, and despite herself Lorna found that she was looking too.

“The TARDIS isn’t only in Carthage,” said the Doctor sadly. “It’s all over; everywhere is here. We only see what’s right in front of our nose, but I walk in time and space; my nose could be anywhere. The Viking hordes off to do invading, a newspaper seller in eighties Istanbul— they’re just as real as the people who’re out there now. I could go and see them at the a flick of a switch, just as quickly as I could step outside.

She shuddered, the blades of her shoulders tense.

“Whatever happens here,” she said, “someone is going to die. It’s all I can do to make sure it isn’t you.”

For a moment Lorna’s brow seemed to ease, and it looked like she might forgive her friend after all. But underneath her sympathy was something else, something angrier— a sense that awakens whenever the powerful plead.

“I’m sorry,” said Lorna. “I can’t do it. However you try to justify it – even if you _can_ – leaving these people to die; it’s still inhuman—”

“But that’s why I brought you here! I’m _not_ human”—

“ _THEN STOP PRETENDING_!” shouted Lorna, all sympathy breaking. “If you have to do terrible things; _awful_ things, then do them, but don’t go bouncing round like you’re something that you’ve never been! You can’t live without guilt, you’re always doing the things that should make you guilty!”

She laughed joylessly to herself and looked at the Doctor with a false smile.

“What if this was _us_?” she said. “If it was Manchester in danger, and me and my daughter who you’d kill?”

The Doctor looked shocked. “It’s never you,” she said. “Not you, or Chris, not ever. That’s not”—

“No,” laughed Lorna. “It wouldn’t be. Because we’re your _friends_ , so you’ll always protect us. No matter what it means for anyone else. I’ve been on the other side of that; I don’t want to be part of it now.”

“You’re acting like this is something I _want_ to do!” snapped the Doctor. “You don’t know what making these decisions is like”—

For a second Lorna’s whole body tensed and it looked like she might attack the Doctor, but instead she just exploded in a rage, jabbing her finger at her friend like she wanted to puncture the air.

“Don’t you _dare_ ,” she shouted. “Don’t go saying it’s hard to make a choice like this, because you have _NO IDEA_ what it’s like to be someone it’s made _about_. After this you’ll feel guilty; but you’ll still feel, you’ll walk away. You won’t be some notch in someone’s ledger; without any kind of a face or a life”—

She stopped and swallowed, taking a deep breath. When she next spoke, she was on the verge of tears.

“Chrissy told me about the lizard people,” she said quietly. “The ones on the Earth before us. How you knew they had no future, but wouldn’t ever say.”

The Doctor snarled. “You going to have a go about that as well?”

“No,” said Lorna without anger. “I meant”—

She broke off and gave a huge sob, a raw, animal cry that was somehow worse than any of the anger or the fear. The Doctor started to come towards her, her own anger forgotten as well, but Lorna was shaking her head and beckoning her to stay away.

“Don’t think I don’t know what it means to be you,” Lorna said as she wept. “To want to tell my daughter that everything’s going to be fine, and to have nothing to say if she asks if that’s really true. Those people out there would _die_ for their future, Doctor, and I... I don’t always know if we even have one”—

She gulped, and steadied herself.

“You brought me here because you wanted my advice,” said Lorna, “and it’s this. Either stop your friend or don’t; I’m not getting into it. But don’t go taking the high ground when you’re done. Not in a place like this. Not when real people’ll die.”

“Things like this,” said the Doctor, “they’re what someone like me has to do.”

“Oh, if you like,” said Lorna. “You’re always talking about how you’re a monster. Maybe it’s time you started to actually believe it.”

Lorna kept talking, looking at the floor.

“I’ve talked to Christina,” she said, “and we both think that when this is over we shouldn’t keep seeing you anymore. You’re… you’re not what we thought you were. Or you are what I worried you might be.”

The Doctor looked crestfallen at that, and Lorna could tell she was trying not to cry as well.

“However it might seem,” said the Doctor softly, “the Monk’s way isn’t better”—

“This isn’t about the Monk,” said Lorna, “not really. She’s just made obvious what I already knew deep how. However hard you try, in the end you’re still”— 

– she looked anywhere but the Doctor’s eyes –

—“you’re a Lord,” she said. “And we’re not, Doctor.”

Both of them looked at each other for a while, quiet and defeated.

“Yeah,” said the Doctor in the end. “Yeah, I am. And I wish so much I could stop. To live a different life.”

Lorna laughed. “You only think that because you don’t have to. You wouldn’t last a minute, out in the world.”

The Doctor smiled.

“No,” she said. “I do know that, at least.”

The silence came back again, until it had to stop.

“I’ll miss you,” said the Doctor. “Both of you. It’s been good having you here.”

“Yes,” said Lorna hollowly. “We did have fun.”

The silence didn’t stop after that, although both of them were screaming inside.

Lorna walked off out of the console room without saying goodbye, and the TARDIS flicked off the lights as she went away.

“Great,” said the Doctor blankly to herself. “Everything’s going well.”

She sat for a while in the darkness of the forest, completely and utterly alone.


	15. Chapter 15

Chris’s bedroom in the TARDIS was like the attic of a farmhouse, the roof sloping heavily over her while she slept. Sometimes, her whole room would hammer with the sound of rain. There was no way of telling whether or not it was real.

The rain was thundering now as Chris lay awake. She’d pretended she wasn’t sad about leaving the Doctor, but her mother hadn’t been fooled— it was for the best, she’d said, and maybe that was even true. Since Chris had met the Doctor her life had been dangerous and horrifying; she’d been exposed to things no child should ever see. But perhaps that would still be true after they’d parted ways, though then there’d be less colour in the world.

A part of her thought the rain sounded like a whisper, then with a start she realised that wasn’t true. There _was_ a whisper just outside her door, saying something in a frantic northern accent.

“Quietly!” the accent was saying, more loudly than it realised. “We can’t let anyone hear! There’s beds just here, but you can’t go snoring too loudly”—

Chris sighed, got out of bed, then flung her door wide open.

Outside, the Doctor grinned with a horrified smile. Beside her was a small boy, who looked confused.

“Chris!” said the Doctor too enthusiastically. “You’re up late! This is, ah, a part of the TARDIS that likes to disguise itself as a child”—

“No I’m not,” said the boy.

“One lie, Hanno,” said the Doctor through gritted teeth. “That’s all you had to tell.”

She pointed to the door opposite Chris.

“That bedroom should do,” she said. “Nice sheets, springy mattress; all the luxuries of the Earth that’s still to come.”

Hanno stared at her silently. She might as well have been talking to herself.

“You’ll be off to sleep, then,” she said weakly to him when the silence had passed.

He opened the door and went into his room, still making no sound as he went.

“Trauma,” said the Doctor, sounding unconvinced. “It does terrible things to a child.”

She turned to Chris, her face now tight and tense.

“Don’t tell your mother what I’m doing,” she said.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” said Chris. “Are you kidnapping people?”

“No,” said the Doctor. “Not exactly.”

“Then what? Are there _other_ families you meet while we’re asleep?”

“That’s not what’s happening here,” said the Doctor, avoiding the question. “I’m evacuating the city. As many people as I can get away with, so history’s not to notice. Which isn’t very many, but might be something.”

Chris looked at her oddly. “You don’t want me to tell Mum that you’re saving people?”

“Oh, you know. She’ll say that I’m wrong to do it. And maybe I am.”

Chris frowned. “I don’t think she would. Not if she could see you now.”

Chris was looking at the Doctor’s eyes which were staring at nothing, like the eyes of Houdini if he somehow got finally trapped. Some people did good things because it made them feel good about themselves, but that wasn’t what was happening here. The Doctor hated doing good, Chris saw: she just hated what happened if she didn’t even more.

“I’m sorry about what I said earlier,” said Chris. “You’re a better person than the Monk.”

The look in the Doctor’s eyes didn’t change.

“I’m not,” she said softly. “I’ve never been a good person at all.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Chris. “But I’ll still miss you, after you’ve gone away.”

She looked down the corridor of the TARDIS for more refugees from the city, and saw no living things there at all.

“They can sleep in my room,” said Chris, “now that I know they’re here. I can stay up all night, if it means that more people get saved.”

The Doctor smiled at that, more genuinely than Chris had seen in an age.

“Now _you_ ,” said the Doctor, “you’re definitely a good person. We’re not hurting for space in here, though. You could fit a planet in the TARDIS; never mind Carthage. But thank you, all the same. Appreciated.”

Gently, the Doctor pushed Chris’s door slightly closed.

“You’ll need to sleep,” the Doctor said. “Get some rest. You could be home, by the time that morning comes.”

Chris looked away. “Will you say goodbye?” she said.

“Not yet!” said the Doctor. “And never very well. But when the time comes, yes. Of course I will. But now? Now it’s just goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Doctor. Enjoy saving people.”

The Doctor winced, and Chris knew that she never would.


	16. Chapter 16

Daleks won. That was the first thing anyone knew about them. They’d triumphed against species that could bend spacetime to their will, and here they were fighting starved men with iron swords. This should have been a massacre, but somehow it hadn’t been. Dawn was breaking over Carthage, yet the city had not yet been broken.

The thought didn’t lighten Arabo’s spirits. It was incredible to have stood out so long against the Romans— it would have been even if they’d stayed as men. It wasn’t enough to withstand them, though. At some point his people had to win.

And Carthage was holding out, but it wasn’t winning. The bodies of soldiers were piling up, looking less dead than those left alive. The city would burn, Arabo knew. The only question left was when.

“The weapon,” he gasped to Hasdrubal as he dodged another bolt of energy. “We’ve come as far as we can without it.”

Hasdrubal looked stern, and Arabo knew his general still had faith. He would remain a hero to the end, perhaps. It might have been better if he’d been a tyrant after all

“More men!” Hasdrubal cried. “This fight can be won, but we will need reinforcements! I know we still have those who aren’t here to stand and fight.”

No one was running to their aid, he saw. There were faces he’d expected to see that weren’t there, citizens who’d be willing to aid the cause. But in the dawn light Carthage felt deserted, a creature drawing still before it died.

“Such silence,” he said. “Do my people all cower in fear?”

“They’re gone,” replied a far from human voice.

He looked up at a Roman stretching out what had once been a hand, which had twisted into something black and round. He had seen what those things could do, all through the night. Perhaps it was better to give in there and then—

—but his thoughts were broken by a roar of sound, as a boom like an earthquake blasted the Roman away.

“You,” Hasdrubal said, squinting up to the source of the sound. “The Monk.”

Her plastic coat looked dull against the dawn; her face was puffy and her eyes were worn. She seemed half-faded, just like his army was— yet seeing her gave him some bit of hope, at least.

“A scheme of yours?” he shouted over the debris. “Hiding my people away so I’ll want to fire the bomb?”

“Not one of mine!” laughed the Monk. “It’s the other one who’s taken them. _The Doctor_. She’s been squirrelling people away all night. Half the city must be gone, the number of trips she’s made.”

Hasdrubal’s stomach dropped.

“She took my people?” he said. “Was she a Roman spy?”

“Worse,” said the Monk. “She was an idiot. She thought your city had to die; never occurred to her that it didn’t. So she saved as many as she thought she could. It’s the sort of thing she does, so to tell herself she’s a good person.”

They were only words, and they hit Hasdrubal harder than a laser.

“She told me there was hope,” he said blankly.

“Because she isn’t actually a good person,” said the Monk. “That’s how she treats the people she’s able to forget. But it’s not going to work, not for much longer. There’s too many people who feel they’re forgotten now.”

“Because we’re Carthage,” said Hasdrubal with ice in his veins.

“It’s more than only you. Anyone who’s obscure or far away. She only needs to forget you’re still really people.”

“Then she’s a monster,” said Hasdrubal.

“Oh, she’s just stuck in her ways. Needs to be shaken out of them. But that’s the thing about a hydrogen bomb, Hasdrubal. It has a way of shaking people very badly indeed.”

She was interrupted by the crash of an enormous volley of lasers, shot from a Roman who barely looked human anymore. Her screwdriver blasted the air slightly late: a long line of soldiers had already gone down dead.

“I’m heading up to the citadel, at any rate,” she said. “You want to go down fighting that’s fine by me, but when you do I’ll be busy running away. Unless you want to join me, of course. Use that nuclear ace in our sleeve.”

As Hasdrubal looked at her with despair something broke in him. With her Time Lord senses the Monk could hear a clink, the sound of something unlocking, of hope leaving that man at last. She kept looking somber, trying hard not to grin.

“They want to bring down our city,” said Hasdrubal. “To burn it until only rubble remains. We are still men, even when we lose our mercy. Rome is inhuman now, and mercy it never had. The greatest thing is to end them, that’s the truth of it. Rome must be destroyed. And so Carthage will bring down the sun.”

Hasdrubal’s hopelessness meant there was some kind of hope. As he watched the two of them talking, Arabo felt himself smile.

“The command is yours,” Hasdrubal said to him. “You’ve been frank with me when you feared I’d slay you. Can you buy me the time I need to launch the bomb?”

“Honestly?” said Arabo. “We shouldn’t have lasted a minute against what these Romans have become. But this battle’s gone on for hours, and we’re still here. All we need is for that miracle to hold.”

“Yes,” said Hasdrubal as he looked over at the Monk. “I can hope for that, at least.”

The general and the Time Lord ran in the direction of the city, while Arabo stood tall to command his men.

“Not long now!” he shouted to the exhausted soldiers. “Rome has unthinkable weapons, but we have something even worse! If we can hold them back a little longer, it won’t be our city that ends in fire.”

Lasers fired at Hasdrubal were deflected by iron shields. Buzzing electric lights smashed with the swipe of a sword.

“Not long now,” said Arabo under his breath. “I have to believe that, too.”

His muscles ached, and he charged into battle again.

The sun was exploding out of the line of the sky.


	17. Chapter 17

The Doctor was already in the citadel as Hasdrubal and the Monk rushed in. She was standing in front of her TARDIS and the Monk ran to be beside hers: one on either side of the bomb at the heart of the room.

The Doctor glowered in front of her box, battered and broken, ready to collapse.

The Monk shone in front of hers, like something old made new.

“You!” Hasdrubal snarled as he saw that the Doctor was there.

“He’s well mad, he is,” said the Monk cheerily.

The Doctor groaned. “Not you as well!” she said to Hasdrubal. “I don’t know what I’ve even done to you!”

“You saved his people,” said the Monk.

“You gave me hope when you thought that there was none!” said Hasdrubal. “So that I wouldn’t think to use this weapon. You’d see me dead! My city destroyed; her people slaves”—

“Ah,” said the Doctor. “That’s all pretty bad, right enough. But _wait!_ ” she added as she saw what Hasdrubal was doing, drawing out the key that would launch the bomb.

“And why would I want to do that?” said Hasdrubal as the key slotted into the lock.

“Because I know what this city means to you!” the Doctor cried. “I know what your people mean! It’s what this whole era’s built out of, caring about your own people. But we have to be more than that, ‘cause we’re all part of something much bigger.”

The Monk yawned loudly, fiddling with her nails.

“Everyone is people, Hasdrubal,” the Doctor went on. “Carthage, Egypt, even the Romans are. And so many people who are out there _will_ die if you launch this bomb.”

“Varnish is chipping,” said the Monk to her nails. “No quality in these knock-off brands.”

That nonchalance wasn’t working, the Doctor saw. The Monk was trying to deflate Hasdrubal, but he was beginning to waver. It would just take a little bit more to stay his hand.

“You know what it feels like to lose your world,” she said. “And I do too: been there; felt that. You can spare that loss from so many people, just if you don’t turn that key. I’m sorry, Hasdrubal, really I am. But I don’t think there’s another way.”

The Monk looked up lazily, still sounding bored.

“The Doctor was right, when she said it back there,” she said. “We’re all part of something that’s bigger. But that includes her as much as it does you. And this time, it’s her who should make the sacrifice.”

For the first time since she’d entered the citadel the Doctor felt fear rising inside her, slowly welling up until she felt it through all of her body. The Monk didn’t look bored anymore, not even slightly. She had the enormous grin of a Time Lord about to succeed.

“The man who invented this bomb knew exactly what he’d done,” said the Monk. “The terror he’d created and what it meant. He said that people’d have to change their whole morality to survive it— but that was really hard, so they found another way. They just forgot. Forgot these bombs ever existed, that a few would be aimed at them now. Total annihilation with a second’s notice! You can’t live with something like that. So they all kept on living by forgetting their cities would die.”

“Why are you talking like that?” said the Doctor uncertainly. “What’re you doing?”

“I’m doing _you!_ ” laughed the Monk. “Giving a speech, saving the day. Big damn hero falling out of nowhere, stopping a massacre with her giant mind.”

“This isn’t what I’m like at all,” said the Doctor. “It’s too fatalist; there isn’t any hope”—

”You’re right!” said the Monk. “There’s not any hope for them now. When they look back on this battle, they’ll call it the Third Punic War. But they’ll have their own third war too, and when that happens it’s not just one city that dies.”

“You don’t know that!” said the Doctor. “She doesn’t, there are so many futures. _None_ of it is set in stone”—

”How long will it be until someone there is in your position?” the Monk said to Hasdrubal. “Some ruler nobody’s heard of, with a great pile of hydrogen bombs? Backed into a corner, knowing their time is up, able to take down _everyone_ when he goes?”

“That isn’t me; not anymore,” said Hasdrubal. “It’s not what I want to do.”

“Then stop it from ever happening,” said the Monk. “The world this bomb is from doesn’t need to ever exist. What sort of future creates a weapon like this, then goes around pretending it hasn’t? A rubbish one, which you’d have to be mad to defend. But that’s not the only future that can happen”—

Desperately the Doctor was drawing out her sonic screwdriver, trying to shatter the key before it could be turned. But the Monk had her screwdriver out as well, and with a deafening sound she blasted the Doctor to the ground.

“Don’t,” said the Doctor weakly, her mouth full of fallen plaster. “Both of you don’t have to do this.”

“We do, though,” said the Monk. “Because we’re not the sort of nobodies who destroy. We _protect_ people; we do what we know is right. And it’s not just this city we’re going to save, Hasdrubal.”

Her smile was larger and deadlier than the Doctor’s could ever have been.

“We’re going to save the future,” she said.

Hasdrubal let out an anguished roar as he brought the key to the lock.

 _“NO!”_ shouted the Doctor, after it was already too late.

Above their heads, the bomb shot its way out of the citadel.

The Doctor said something that was quite a lot worse than “Oh Hell.”


	18. Chapter 18

_“YOU’RE COMING WITH ME!”_ the Doctor shouted as she dragged the Monk into the TARDIS. The doors slammed behind her as the two of them struggled with each other, while Lorna and her daughter looked on at them both in surprise.

“Have you done it?” asked Lorna before she saw the Doctor’s face. “You’ve not done it,” she added, once she had.

“It’s the Monk that’s gone and done it,” said the Doctor. “She’s outspeeched me. The bomb’s in the air.”

She was punching buttons all over the TARDIS console as her spaceship flew into the air. A monitor displayed the bomb on its tiny screen, and it already seemed an impossibly long way away.

Chris looked like she wanted to shout a hundred things, but fear overwhelmed every one. Instead she let out a tiny squeak, softly beginning to cry.

“She’s _done_ it?” said Lorna disbelievingly. “She actually launched her bomb?”

“Don’t be that way!” said the Doctor. “You were well up for this just last night.”

Lorna shook her head. “No. It’s different when it’s just talk. Now it’s happening it all feels insane. It doesn’t actually _happen_ , not in the real world.

“They’ve always been there,” said the Monk. “All your life and more, hiding in the shadows.”

“God, us humans are idiots,” said Lorna. “No wonder you’re rude to us all the time. We don’t need aliens, do we? To blow up the world.”

“The alien over there’s trying her damnedest,” muttered the Doctor.

“You know what I noticed about the three of you?” said the Monk, who hadn’t been listening. “You’re a coven. A maiden, a mother and a crone! It’s just like in the stories.”

“That’s very reductive,” said the Doctor.

“And sexist!” said Lorna.

“I’m not a _maiden_ ,” said Chris. “You’re not a nice person at all.”

“Great,” said the Doctor, “everyone agrees with me _after_ the nuclear bomb’s in the sky. That’s definitely the order I was going for.”

“About that,” said Lorna, “what’re you planning to _do?_ Do you have a special tool to stop it? A nuke-disabling spade, or something?”

”Don’t be ridiculous,” said the Doctor. “I’m going to make it slam into the TARDIS. It’ll blow up in the sky, but not in the scary way.”

She mimed the relative size of the explosions in her hands, misjudging the mood of the room.

“You’re going to _crash us into a nuclear bomb?_ ” said Chris in horror.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” said the Doctor, “which is extremely bad indeed. The TARDIS might look like a disused loo, but she’s nearly indestructible. If a big rocket hits it at high speed then the weapon just smashes apart. Small explosion, nothing nuclear. Controlled detonation, if you like.”

“I, uh,” said Lorna, “I hope you’re very confident about that.”

“Well, I’ve a lot of experience with it! Russia and the States, pointing so many missiles at each other. Did you _really_ think that nothing had ever gone wrong?”

Chris felt an awfulness in the pit of her stomach, worse than anything she’d ever felt when thinking about aliens.

“You mean,” she said, “that there was almost a nuclear”—

“Loads of times. But I soon put a stop to all that.”

“From the outside, said the Monk, that might seem like it was _changing history_.”

The Doctor moved to respond, then stopped when she saw what was happening to Chris. Her friend had gone pale, sat on a rug and clutching her knees. She looked like she was past even wanting to cry.

“Look what you’ve done,” Lorna said to the Doctor. “You can’t be so blithe about this, not in front of a child”—

“No,” said the Doctor, “Not in that way.”

“But you have to do it in some way,” said the Monk as she cleaned her nails. “Or you live in a fake kind of world. Where the Doctor always wins and the bomb never drops. And everything’s safe ‘till the day that they’re all in the air.”

“You’re teaching us a lesson?” said Lorna.

“God, no,” said the Monk. “I just thought I’d rub it all in.”

The TARDIS was rushing at twelve times the speed of sound, accelerating towards the bomb as it raced towards Rome.

”You’ve always been both cruel and cowardly, Monk,” said the Doctor as her hands leapt between joysticks and dials, “‘cause you’re always into breaking, never building. It was never about change in the end. You’re the one who dooms history—“

–The TARDIS swung round the bomb so its back swept right up in front of it–

—”and I’m the one that saves it.”

The Doctor gave a horrible charmless grin.

Untrackably fast, the missile roared into the TARDIS’s back…

...then there was a different sort of roar in the console room, as something seemed to twist within reality. For a moment all of them felt like they were everywhere, and when things were normal again the missile had passed right through.

The TARDIS doors had swung open, like something had punched its way out.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?” said Lorna. “Doctor? Should that have happened the way it did?”

She stopped talking when she saw the Doctor’s expression. She was used to her friend being angry or confused. But she’d never seen her look _dumbstruck_ in the way that she seemed now. That was when Lorna knew: the Doctor was truly afraid.

“Oh God,” said Lorna to the calm of the forest around them. “Oh God, oh God, it’s actually happening”—

“Did you honestly think,” said the Monk over the aghast room, “that I wouldn’t have made a failsafe? I’ve learned from failures; you always have to plan for the Doctor. And I’m not going to fail this time,” she said with a snarl. “D’you hear me, do you see me? _Not this time._ ”

Chris looked out the open doors and couldn’t even see the missile anymore. They went so fast, Joe’s dad had said. You couldn’t even see them if you tried.

“No!” Chris cried desperately to the Monk. “That can’t be all you have; It wouldn’t be! You must have something else.”

“Must I?” grinned the Monk. “Something like _this?_ ”

She pulled out a long, thin pen from one side of her jacket. The clicky bit at the top of it was big and button red, and it was obvious to everyone what it was.

“You can stop it!” says Chris.”You can detonate the bomb!”

“Yeah!” said the Monk. “And I’m not going to.”

“But you have to!” cried Chris through her tears. “You can’t stand there and do nothing; you can’t let it actually happen.”

The Monk just laughed at that, gleefully and wildly, the sound of someone who’d long ago broken to shards.

“How are you laughing?” said Lorna. “You see what this is doing to my daughter and just keep on laughing like it’s _funny?_ ”

“Because this is what your Doctor is!” said the Monk, smiling as she looked up to her friend. “All this, it’s just seeing the consequences, feeling them! Somebody had to suffer and somewhere had to die. Only now it’s your world, and now it’s _you_. What makes this different, Doctor? What ever made your plan so different to mine?”

A tiny part of the Doctor’s brain that hadn’t given into terror was frantically doing equations. Acceleration, distance, time to detonation. There were only moments left to save the world.

She couldn’t stop the tears that were in her eyes.

“There is no difference,” she said hollowly. “You were right. About everything. I let people die, even when I shouldn’t, and I do it to save _their_ world!”

She gestured at Lorna and Chris, who were tightly squeezing each other’s hands.

“And of course I know what that means,” she said. That Silurians and Carthaginians and millions of other people aren’t being saved, and of course that haunts me. Of course it does! But I can’t ever stop saving that one little place, because”—

—her eyes filled with tears—

—“because _I love them,_ ,” she said. “All of them! Everyone on that tiny island in that little bit of time! I… I can’t let them go, Monk. And you can’t either. Please. _You can’t.”_

She was looking right into the Monk’s eyes, trying her best not to plead.

“Friends,” she said. “Always friends! The best of them. Wanting what’s right, shouting at what’s unjust. Doing it because of love. Monk, you have to listen to me. _Please._ ”

The Monk looked at her, expression impossible to read. In her hand, a beeping red light on her pen indicated the bomb was about to blow.

She sighed, almost imperceptibly.

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” she said.

The Doctor sighed with relief.

“Only,” said the Monk, “It’s not all I wanted to do.”

She snapped the pen in half with both her hands.

Chris and Lorna and the Doctor all screamed as pure white struck the air—

—A roar that was brighter than light flashed through the TARDIS wood.


	19. Chapter 19

Time Lords weren’t as special as they liked to think. Yes, when history changed, they’d always feel it— but every creature in the universe could sense when something went _really_ wrong.

The battle had stopped, and everyone’s anger had gone. The Romans were human again, but barely noticed. Their minds were taken up by something even worse. They knew without knowing that their city had just been destroyed.

“We won,” said Arabo, like saying it might make it feel true. “We shouldn’t have managed it. But we did.”

He stared hazily at the soldiers of Rome and Carthage, who looked back with the same stunned expression. They’d been following a script and the theatre had just burned down, and no one really knew what should happen next.

There was one man who didn’t look dazed, Arabo noticed. Scipio was completely human once again, but something of the monster was still sweeping over his sneer.

Perhaps there was still a little of the Dalek in him, or perhaps he was only a man. Everything he’d wanted to be had fallen away. He had hoped to prove a young man could be as worthy as any, but the old men of Rome had all burned. Youth was the only thing any Roman now had left.

“Soldiers!” he bellowed in a way that made every side jump. “Don’t just stand around gawping! Everything we feared was true! Carthage always was a danger to our city; it needed to be destroyed. And we waited too long to do it, so our homes lie wreathed in flames!

He was glistening red with anger, and then his voice went wrong.

_”ALL THIS VICTORY SHOWS,”_ he shouted in a loud, half-mechanical voice, _IS THE NEED! FOR ROME! TO HAVE VENGEANCE!” FOR THIS CITY! TO BURN! LIKE OURS!”_

He didn’t sound very human, the Romans thought. Those that had almost become Daleks were shuddering at his words. They had let themselves be conquered by something they’d never feared. They hadn’t even noticed that it was happening.

Arabo noticed that in their faces. They didn’t look like soldiers anymore.

“Stand down,” he said quietly to the Romans.

“They’ll do do such thing!” spluttered Scipio, his voice shocked into normality again. “They’ll end your life here and now!”

“My general will not wish to show vengeance,” said Arabo wearily. “You saw how strong we are, what we can do. We will show mercy, for as long as we are not tested.”

“ _Tested?!_ ” said Scipio. “You’ll be _obliterated!_ These men are in the service of the greatest republic in the world!”

Arabo looked down at the Romans, and finally let himself smile.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, they are.”

He turned to face the defeated army.

“Arrest this man,” he said to the defeated army. “Show that you have loyalty to Carthage.”

“No!” yelled Scipio. “You are _MY_ men!” he said in a voice that was going Dalek, “ _YOU WILL FOLLOW MY ORDERS!_ ”

The iron discipline of Rome couldn’t disguise that its soldiers were unconvinced.

We _SHALL SURVIVE_ through the _GREATEST ADVERSITY!_ ” Scipio roared. “Our _PEOPLE’S STRENGTH WILL NOT BE QUELLED BY FLAME! WE WILL! BURN THIS CITY! WE WILL! CONQUER THIS WORLD! WE WILL KILL ITS PEOPLE WHERE THEY STAND, AND WE WILL”—_

–his voice erupted to a roar–

_“EXTERMINATE!”_ he shouted. _“EXTERMINATE!”_

“Arrest this man,” said Arabo quietly again. 

No one stood in the way as Scipio was led to the cells.

The sun was fully up now, and the new day had begun. The two armies sized each other awkwardly, neither knowing what they should do.

“Is the war over, then?” said one of the slower Roman soldiers.

Arabo caught his eye, despite himself.

“It’s over,” he said.

A grin broke over his face as he said it, and then he was laughing with joy and disbelief. The sky was bright blue and the air was biting, and he knew that everyone in both armies was thinking the same thing as him. This should never have happened; it wasn’t supposed to. But it _had_ happened, and everything was new once again.

You could change history. Miracles sometimes happened, after all.


	20. Chapter 20

Everyone was silent in the TARDIS now, as even the Doctor had no idea what to say. She held Chris’s hand as Lorna took the other, the three of them staring at the mushroom cloud high over Rome.

“This didn’t happen,” said Lorna eventually.

“No,” said the Doctor. “But it’s happening now.”

“Will we die?” said Chris, daring to ask the question. “Will we ever be alive? What happens, now everything is gone?”

The Doctor looked as though she hadn’t heard her. Her eyes were glazed and her face was slack. She looked like someone who’d discovered that everything she’d known was a lie.

“I don’t know,” she said, emotionlessly. “Something very bad will happen, I expect. But I don’t know what.” She looked helpless. “Nothing like this has happened before.”

The Monk laughed at that, a loud snort that sounded right out of Manchester. But Manchester was lost, would never exist now at all.

“Don’t _laugh!_ said Chris. “Can’t you see that she was trying? You’ve killed thousands of people, millions. You’ve killed _me!_ You’ve killed my Mum. You shouldn’t be laughing like none of that even matters.”

The Doctor had run to the console as Chris was talking, where she was clattering at a keyboard as fast as her fingers could go. On a monitor above her complex graphs twisted and wheeled.

Suddenly she looked up, madness in her eyes.

“None of it does matter,” she said.

“ _What?!_ ” said Lorna. “Everyone we know is _gone_ ”—

“No.” said the Doctor. “They’re not.”

“But the bomb”—

“Changed history,” said the Doctor. “But the old history”—

She nodded up at the monitor.

—“it’s still _there_. And it’s not the only one, either; there’s hundreds of timelines all crowded up into the universe.”

“Oh, Doctor,” laughed the Monk, “you are _funny!_ Changing history’s my _thing_ ; I’ve tried it loads of times! How could you think that I’ve never once succeeded?”

“You’ve done this before,” said the Doctor, her voice half-sick.

“So many times. The Bombing of Dresden. The Children’s Crusade. The places I thought you wouldn’t go, for the people I knew you’d never save. Funny thing, though. Everywhere I went, no matter when it was. They always had something like _this_ ”—

She threw something from her pocket right at the Doctor’s face, but the Doctor caught it before it could hit home. She’d known what the something would be, but it still hurt to see it: a scrap of blue metal like a bit of old meccano, like the ones from all the futures which she’d seen. But _only_ in the futures, never anywhere else. Somehow she’d not thought to check if—

—“The past is broken,” said the Doctor.

“I’ve been trying to tell you that all along,” said the Monk. “A horrible place, is history.”

“It’s not just the future that’s splintering,” said the Doctor. “Everything is! All of time and space. I was looking for the centre like only the time to come mattered, but if it was _everything_ that was broken…”

She trailed off as an awful thought finally occurred to her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” the Doctor said to the Monk. “You knew I was wrong all along. We could’ve fought together, been proper allies”— 

“Because I wanted to see you plead,” said the Monk with an awful smile. “I wanted to watch you _beg!_ To know what you really were, what you’d do when the worst of it comes. And if I’m honest, some part of me hoped that you’d changed. Silly, really. You’re Time Lord to the bone.”

She reached into her pockets to raise her screwdriver into the air, and for an awful moment Chris thought she was about to attack them all. But instead a thrumming sound came beneath the roar of the bomb— the noise of a TARDIS materialising into the world.

“It’s not true,” said the Doctor. “I’m not what you think I am, Monk. I’m awful, yeah. But I’m never that.”

“You _always_ are,” said the Monk, “And always will be, even when you’re bones. So many faces, but your true face never changes.”

“If that’s what you want to believe,” said the Doctor hollowly. Somehow, she looked even more beaten than she should.

“It’s what I’ve known,” said the Monk, “for as long as I can remember. And it’s why whoever we are; whatever we do? We’ll both be the same as always”—

–She laughed a final laugh–

“Enemies.”

Before any of them could respond the Monk had run past them all, and Chris screamed as she dived out of the TARDIS doors. For a second her silhouette was visible against the remnants of the mushroom cloud, then a loud _splash_ came from somewhere not that far below.

Chris and her mother looked out down through the open doors. Some way down from them an arcade machine was suspended in the air, its back swinging open to the sky. Within it was a glimpse of a slightly run-down swimming pool, through which a frizzy-haired woman was happily wading away.

“That’s quite clever,” said Chris’s mother. “She is clever, isn’t she?” she said to the Doctor. “Your friend.”

“I already said it,” said the Doctor in a tone she had never used. “The Monk. Is not. My friend.”

Chris’s mother turned to respond to that, then froze when she saw the Doctor’s expression. It was the face someone you’d trusted wore when they stopped pretending, the day they no longer needed to hide what they really were.

“You don’t need to be that way, Doctor,” she said. “It’s fine! She said nothing bad’ll happen to Christina and me”—

“Yes,” snapped the Doctor. “Everything’s fine.”

Chris moved very slightly, so her mother stood between her and the furious Time Lord.

Here’s a bit of glass!” said the Doctor as she snapped one off from her console, “and it’s looking _FINE!_ ”

She bought her knee hard up against the glass, and Chris flinched as it exploded into pieces.

”Would you look at that!” said the Doctor. “Some glass that’s just utterly fine. It’s all smashed to pieces and can’t ever be fixed again, but a human who knows nothing about it says that it must be okay! She must be worth listening to, right? Her species evolved from a lemur!”

“Doctor,” said Chris’s mother. “You know that isn’t what I meant—“

“And listen to these emergency sirens!” shouted the Doctor as they started to blare overhead. “It’s a good job I installed those, so they’d be able to tell me that everything’s all okay. History’s been broken far more than any of us knew, even the _Martial_ Laws of Time are suspended, causality is literally collapsing, but an _idiotic primate_ said that _EVERYTHING’S BLOODY FINE!_ ”

There were the rings of bells and the tolling of broken clocks, and in the grey sky above the TARDIS thunder was starting to break.

“You’re scaring me,” said Chris from behind her mother.

“I’m scaring me too,” said the Doctor with a face-breaking grin. “Can you imagine what that must be like? If you’re frightened from the outside. ‘Cause it’s so much bigger when you’re stuck in this giant old brain!”

She rapped her temple and began to laugh _with_ humour then, the kind that comes after everything you love has been destroyed. She laughed against the thunder and the sound, and her voice became part of the roar lashing the TARDIS.

“Well, she’s gone mad,” said Chris’s mother under her breath. “And history’s blowing itself to bits. And I was going to get to go clubbing tonight.”

She hugged her daughter in a way that covered her, to shelter her from what the Doctor had become.

Through a spiral of breaking realities, the TARDIS continued to fall.


	21. Chapter 21

It was a bright spring day and some time had passed in Carthage, enough to forget that Rome had existed at all. No one was fat – not yet – but few were now hungry or starving. Children were playing in the streets that had withstood death, and the furnaces were still melting down swords into tools for the farm.

Hasdrubal and Arabo were looking down on their city, through the hole where their bomb had once flown. The sky had gone strange since Rome had been destroyed, and the winds seemed colder now. Yet neither of those things really mattered to a city that hadn’t burned down.

“Permission to speak,” said Arabo to his leader.

“You know you don’t need that,” said Hasdrubal with a smile. “I’m no general now. We’re not at war anymore.”

Even with permission freely given, Arabo hesitated before he spoke.

“Not against men,” he said at last. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re up against something bigger.”

He looked out past the harbour to the sea, where boats were coming and going once again.

“I try to be happy,” he said. “But we both know what we felt on the final night. Everyone sensed it, maybe across the world. All this… it wasn’t _supposed_ to happen, whatever that means. You should have been a monster and this city should be gone. All of us should have died, but we’re living on.

Hasdrubal smiled. “And who decides what was supposed to happen?”

Arabo shrugged. “The gods, perhaps.”

“Yes. But we met a god, didn’t we? And it turned out that she’d changed her mind.”

Hasdrubal sighed after that. He looked out to the sea, then down to Arabo again.

“It’s not only the gods who get to choose,” he said. “That’s what she knew all along. That it didn’t matter how the story should have ended, if we were willing to change it enough. We held our own destiny in our hands, I think. Even when it was already written.”

Arabo smiled. “That sounds a little like blasphemy.”

Hasdrubal laughed. “I’d rather be a heretic than be dead. Hence why I thought it was time to expand our Pantheon. To give our thanks to someone who was new.”

He gestured over to the side of the citadel, where a new statue stood among the old. It was hastily sculpted and less than a brilliant likeness, but anyone in the city would know who it was supposed to be. Her strange clothes; her mysterious travelling box. The sort of person you knew you were able to worship.

“She wasn’t a god,” said Arabo.

“No,” said Hasdrubal. “She was a teacher. Who had exactly the wrong lesson at precisely the wrong time. And I’m more glad than anything in the world that she decided to tell it here.”

Over the coming years many histories would be written of that day, when Carthage stood for the first time as the greatest city in the world. Scholars would come up with ways to explain it, how a starved and tiny army held back the strength of Ancient Rome. But there was always the crater that marked a forgotten city, reminding the world how some things would never be understood.

And some would also whisper that a woman had been there, in an odd and ugly ship that had come from beyond the world. They said she’d come because of her firm beliefs, though no one ever agreed on what they were. She’d been from a very different place, after all. But she’d saved them all anyway, of course she had. Because that was the right thing to do. She was eccentric and she could be difficult, but before anything else she was good. She was a genius. She was a hero.

And she was known only as the Monk.


End file.
